The Neighborhood Podcast
This is a podcast of Guilford Park Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina featuring guests from both inside the church and the surrounding community. Hosted by Rev. Dr. Stephen M. Fearing, Head of Staff.
The Neighborhood Podcast
From Oral to Written: The Evolution of Hebrew Scripture (September 28, 2025 Sunday School)
Presenter: Rev. Kit Schooley
Journey through 4,000 years of Hebrew scripture evolution in this fascinating exploration of how ancient oral traditions transformed into standardized sacred texts. Discover the dramatic moment when King Josiah, during temple renovations in 604 BCE, uncovered the long-forgotten scroll of Deuteronomy—a discovery so shocking that "he tore his robes" upon hearing its contents. This pivotal event reestablished Passover celebrations and reformed religious practices that had drifted over generations.
Follow the Hebrew scriptures through periods of crisis and renewal: the Babylonian exile that forced religious adaptation without a temple, the creation of the Greek Septuagint that brought scripture to diaspora communities, and the painstaking work of the Masoretes who finally standardized Hebrew by adding vowel markings to a language previously written only with consonants. Each development reflects not just textual evolution but profound shifts in how an entire faith community understood its relationship with sacred texts.
Perhaps most remarkable is how Judaism transformed after the Second Temple's destruction in 70 CE. With priests suddenly without purpose and sacrificial worship impossible, rabbis emerged as the new religious leaders, synagogues replaced the temple, and scripture became the central unifying force of Jewish identity. Unlike many religious traditions that faltered after losing their central institution, Judaism flourished by developing the rich tradition of Midrash—preserving interpretations from great teachers across generations that continue to inform religious thought today.
This story reveals how a faith tradition's ability to adapt its relationship with sacred texts enabled it to survive catastrophic losses and flourish through millennia of diaspora. What began as stories passed down through oral repetition became a sophisticated textual tradition that sustained religious identity without a homeland, demonstrating remarkable resilience through some of history's greatest challenges.
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Alright, all right. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_05:I used to put that getting back down to it.
unknown:I get tired of it. But usually I enjoyed it. Pretty good in the morning.
SPEAKER_05:It's definitely hot when I thought I'm doing it. I have to get my red.
unknown:But I can't go all day. I can't go all day like I used to. Yeah, yes.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:I used to ride my bicycle for about 20 or 30 miles.
SPEAKER_04:We have 20 or 30 miles.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, I was into it. Sound like rack, but rat used to be a little bit. Yeah, used to have. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So we closed the book today. We go from the beginning to the middle, I guess you'd say. We're going to do in one day, but cover four or five thousand years. It took three days to do six or seven hundred years. So this will be pretty quick, down and dirty. Yeah. So just remember that. We're going to take a period of time, let's say, from 4,000 before the Christian era. We're going to go through a lot of years when people didn't have anything to write on. And the entire way that life ran was verbal. It was oral. Everything that was remembered was remembered because we repeated it and repeated it and repeated it. And writing it down just wasn't an option. It's a lot different than the way the Christians started. They could write things down. They could keep things. They didn't have to remember, they didn't have to do, as I've remarked here a couple of times, they didn't have to do and avoid the whisper down the alley kind of issue. And a lot of what happened to the Jews, of course, was things kept changing because the way they wanted to see the past had changed from when it was the past. So let's start with one of Matthew's women, who he put in Jesus' genealogy. Let's start with Bathsheba. Remember her? She was married to Eurita the Hittite, the Hittite. Hittites were tribe from Turkey. And David fell in love with Bathsheba when she was out on the roof of an adjoining house. So David conveniently arranged so that Uriah's, or pardon me, Bathsheba's husband Uriah, would be led by David's army into battle, which for sure meant that Uriah would not come back from battle. This is a good juicy New Testament story, an Old Testament story. And so that left Bathsheba a widow. David couldn't let a widow go unnoticed, so they got married, and this is where kind of our version of the Hebrew scripture begins, because Bathsheba has a child. Her child. anybody know who her child was? The king that came after David, Solomon. And what did Solomon do? He built the temple. And of course, the temple was the center of Hebrew life for, let's just say, a very long time. As it says in the Old Testament about Solomon, God gave Solomon wisdom and exceedingly great understanding and largeness of heart as great as the sand on the seashore. But Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the men of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt and people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon from all the kings of the earth. Pretty high praise. So Solomon builds the temple. He's the first king who leads the people in the temple. The last king is King Josiah. His name didn't get up here. Josiah. Josiah was the last king because he was carried away into Babylon in 587 with most of the rest of the Jews. And the temple was destroyed. So we go from Solomon to Josiah. But before Josiah had the embarrassment of losing his kingdom and being carried off into Babylon, there was another important event that Josiah kind of presided over. And I want to read you that event from the book of 2 Kings. In the 18th year of his reign, King Josiah sent his secretary, Saphan, to the Temple of the Lord. He said, Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, and have him get ready the money that has been brought into the temple of the Lord, which the doorkeepers have collected from the people. Have them entrust the money to the men appointed to supervise the work on the temple, and have these men pay the workers who repair the temple of the Lord, but they need not account for the money entrusted to them because they are honest in their dealing. Hokiah, this having happened, said to the secretary to Josiah, Saphon, I have found the book of the law in the temple of the Lord. He gave the book to Saphon, who read it. And then Saphon, Josiah's secretary, went to him and reported to him, Your officials have paid out the money that was in the temple of the Lord, and then Sapon informed the king of this. The priest there has given me a book. And Saphon read it from it in the presence of King Zosiah. And when the king heard the words of the book of the law, what we call Deuteronomy, he tore his robes. He gave these orders to Hilkiah the priest. Go and inquire of the Lord for me and for all the people and all of Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great must be the Lord's anger that burns against us, because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the words of this book. They have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us. King Josiah was startled, flummoxed with the discovery of this scroll. It was sort of the beginning of a realization that things written down could turn out to be jarring if you were used to living orally. If you were used to not even realizing how things were changing. And here they are, they're in the midst of doing a little renovation in the temple. And the chief priest of the temple finds this scroll scrolled away somewhere. And it is there that, in a sense, the Hebrew Bible in its present shape begins. In about the year 604 before the Christian era, begins with something that had been neglected, forgotten, and it prompted significant religious reforms. In fact, for every day that Josiah remained living in Jerusalem, he read aloud from the book of Deuteronomy to the people. Now, scholars would suggest that this is a little bit of political manipulation. They would suggest that the book really hadn't been lost. It was just that the kings had started to realize how bad things were getting in Judah, and they needed some way to kind of shake the people up, and this book was just a thing. So we're not really sure exactly how to work. But the discovery of this book, Deuteronomy, triggered a national religious revival, and it reestablished the Passover, which, believe it or not, they had not been observing. It abolished the idolatrous practices, especially of how they sacrificed animals on the altar. And the book's contents, especially, especially the blessings and the curses sections, of which, if you read Deuteronomy 12, 26, they do go on, shocked the leadership of all of Israel and highlighted the consequences of what would happen to them if they were disobedient to the Lord. So in some, the rediscovery refers to them sort of finding their faith again and realizing that the written word needed to be paid attention to. Now, in an ancient faith, as the Israelis, as the Judeans, the Israelites had, they had had writings for a long time. I mean, Moses came down from the mountain with some of them. And then, of course, there are some stories that Moses destroyed them and so on and so forth. But they had had writings for a long time. So they had been remembering what you and I would call scripture, but they had always been happy to do it orally, very different than Christians. So let's do a little bit of tracing. We go from 587, Josiah, and the rest of the kingdom of Judah is carried off, and of course, the chances of sort of establishing some scripture while you're off in Babylonia is pretty limited. So they're there until, let's just say, roughly the year 400, when the Assyrians have sort of taken over from the Babylonians, and the Assyrians had a political philosophy that was you just didn't need to keep all these captured people, and it's like taking care of people in prison. You just don't want to constantly do that. And so the Assyrians let them go back, and the great books in the Bible that speak to that return, the return to Jerusalem, to where there is no temple, because the first one had been destroyed, those stories are contained in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Ezra had the habit every day of standing on the location where the temple had been and reading from parts of the Torah so that the people would hear the words repeated repeatedly as opposed to carried down and remembered as we may have heard them recently. So Ezra and the Amaya are a big portion of what gets things kind of recorded finally, things pulled together, because the other thing they pull together is the second temple. It is in their era that we get the temple returning. So we go from that to let's say 150 before the Christian era. And the way the Jewish world has evolved is there are Jews in a great diaspora. And one of the strongest places the Jews are, believe it or not, is in Egypt. And so the priest who is kind of in charge of the Jews in Egypt, decides that he needs to get a written set of scriptures for his people, but they don't speak Hebrew. So there's this impactful story about Ptolemy that he called together six elders from each of the twelve tribes. Six times twelve. And he sends each of them into their own room. Seventy-two rooms. One elder in each room. And he says, I want you to write down the scripture as Moses told it to you. And he gives them some brief period of time to do this. Each separate from the other. And you know what? You know what? They all come out. At least that's the spin that you ptolemy. So it turns out that this translation, if you will, of Hebrew scripture, and we're really not sure exactly which scriptures or where Ptolemy found these scriptures, but of course they were supposedly coming out of the heads of these 72 priests. Imagine that. Created what turned out to be a final document, which is called the Septuagint, or 70, the Septuagint, which let's just say was varied in its approach to the scripture. Some of the translations from Hebrew to Greek were very literal. Others were, let's just call them dynamic. They were translated into Greek so that the Greek would make sense to those Druze of that era, but they did not have a whole lot to do with the Hebrew. Let's just put it that way. They had their own style, and the style meant that the Hellenistic Jewish audience could engage in it, made sense to them. It came in their language, in their vernacular, if you will. So some of the books were translated very literally, and others, let's just say they were interpretations. Let's leave it at that. And they also tried to smooth out the awkwardness of the Hebrew language. Let's stop and talk for a minute about Hebrew. Hebrew is a language of consonants. And until the modern, well, until at least the seventh century, there were no vowels. Think about that. So you would have words that may have three or four consonants in them. And of course, as a child, you were taught to learn the words, and you could make these three or four consonants sound different ways, so you could tell that they were two different words, but it was never written down. And so if you're going to take a language with only consonants, and only how many, Stephen, do you remember how many? How many letters in the Jewish alphabet? I don't know, 20 maybe, 18. If you're going to take a language and not be able to tell exactly what these three letters mean, because they could mean three or four different things, it gets tricky. So we'll get to that and how the Jews solve that problem in a minute. So before the birth of Jesus, we have now a written document for the Jews. The only problem is it's in Greek. And if you live outside of the Hellenistic world, and of course there weren't a lot of Jews, but there were some who still spoke Hebrew, it was pretty much useless to you. So the next thing that happens, let's move ahead, let's say 500 years, and let's get to about the year 400. Well, by the year 400, the Christian churches were expanding, were successful. They were pumping up almost all over the known world. And they had come to a mixed kind of result as to what they thought of the Hebrew scriptures. A part of the general church had said, look, this is our heritage. These are the folks that we grew out of. So we honor them by following their scriptures. And others said, no. You remember this conversation we had for a couple of weeks. Are we going to include the Hebrew scriptures with our scriptures? Some said yes, some said no. But we get to the year 400, and then we have what the Catholics would call Saint Jerome, but Jerome, a priest, who decides that he needs to translate, mostly the Septuagint. He needs to translate it into Latin because Latin is now sort of the new language that's occurring in the known world. We used to speak Greek, now we speak Latin, so Jerome makes a translation. And Jerome takes a look at the Septuagint and says, this isn't going to do. This is sloppy. Now, somehow Jerome got Hebrew materials. I don't know how he got them. I don't know where they came from. And that's sort of one of the mysteries of the Hebrew text. Is these were around, but it's not clear how people like Jerome got a hold of them. But Jerome decided he would only translate as accurately as he could from Hebrew into Latin. He makes this translation, he starts to get it published, if you will, and for all intents and purposes, it becomes what you and I would call the Roman Catholic version of the Old Testament. Not the Protestant version. We'll get to that in a minute, because we have our own, such as we are. This becomes kind of the standard version of the Bible until Luther. Until 1500. So roughly a thousand years, this is the Bible until the Protestants show up, and then they start to kind of push a little here and pull a little there. But we'll get to that in a minute. So this translation that Jerome has made is called the Vulgate. And I just think it's a terrible word. But maybe that's the way to remember it, I'm not sure. But the other thing that Jerome does is there are Hebrew texts that he has found, oh, Bell and the Dragon, The Wisdom of Sirach. He has found all these, but they haven't been rightly translated. And so he decides he's not going to put them in his Hebrew scriptures. In other words, there are a lot of books that have been floating around that maybe you would have just said, if they're in Hebrew, I'll translate them. Jerome makes a differentiation. He says, nope, I'm only going to do these and not those. And so what did those, the ones he doesn't put in his Bible, what did those become? They become these. The Deuterocanonical books, in other words, the second canon. Or if you're a Protestant, you call them the Apocrypha. Or if you're Roman Catholic now, you might call them the intertestamental. And there's anywhere from 12 to 20 of them, and they're never quite the same. You can find Bibles even nowadays that if they have these books, they will not always be the same ones. Roman Catholic Bibles will have some, the American Bible Society will have others. But essentially there are books that didn't quite make it. But on the other hand, we didn't toss them out entirely like the Christians did. We thought we'd keep them because supposedly they were for spiritual enrichment. To read them was spiritually encouraging. So we have two canons now. We have the official one, and then we have the ones for, I don't know, light reading. I'm not quite sure. But we have a second kind of canon that sort of trails along behind, and you know you have you may own a Bible that doesn't have them in it, right? Or you may own a Bible that does have them in it. They've led a varied life over a thousand years. So let me see, where are we? So let's get to these lists. I've given you two handouts, and in a way they're the same. One is just a neat and tidy reference that you can post on your bathroom mirror so that you can memorize the books of the Bible like you had to do for confirmation. And the other is a kind of fuller list, and let's just talk about the fuller list for a minute, because the fuller list of the, what you and I call the Old Testament, is divided into three sections. It's divided into what any good Jew will call the Ta Na Ta. The Ta is the Torah. Most of you know what the Torah is, right? It's the first five, including Deuteronomy. And then the Na is the Nabium, which are what you and I would think of as the prophets. The Hebrew Old Testament divides prophets in ways that you and I wouldn't. They have the greater prophets and the lesser prophets. You see them there in the list. And you'll find them in Hebrew Scripture listed in different order. And like the prophet Jonah, we don't call Jonah a prophet. I'm not sure why we don't, but we don't. The Jews call Jonah a prophet. So we get things like that, where you have in our Old Testament, you have a few of the books from the Nebuchadnezzar that sneaked out into the third group, which is the Ka, which is the writings. So essentially, as the Jews look at their collection of scripture, we have three distinct categories. We have our old scriptures, our original scriptures that come from the misty times thousands of years back, leading up to and including then the year 604 when Josiah claimed they found this scripture. And then we have the prophets. And so the prophets' names rose up because they were, what were the prophets? They were encouraging, they were criticizing, they were chastising, they were hopeful. They were a lot of things to try to keep the people from losing hope. It's an important section of the Hebrew scripture. And then, I'm not sure the Hebrews would say this, but then we have everything else. We have all the things, we have Ezra and Nehemiah, and we have Jonah, and you know, we have a whole lot of other writings that are just sort of collected together there at the end. Now, let me say a couple of things. Finally, we get to where the Jews are finally going to do for themselves what had been done in other languages. We get to what is called the Masoretic text, what Stephen and I in the seminary called the MT, the Masoretic text. There were Masoretes. They, by the seventh century of the Christian era, the Masoretes had become pretty skilled at adding all the vowels in. They had become skilled at being able to distinguish words in the Hebrew text. You know, what was this word? Even though it sounded like another, it had this meaning. And so over a long period of time, maybe 300 years, beginning, say, in the year 600 until, say, the year 900, the Masoretes labored at creating the official text. It was the text that had all the accents, it had all the umlahs, if you will. Well, if you understand languages, it had all the apostrophes and commas, it had everything you needed, so when you looked at the word, you didn't confuse it with another word. Now think about having a language for thousands of years that didn't have any specificity to its words. I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner. But that that was the strength of the oral tradition. It's very impressive. It's impressive they got to the seventh century before finally they said, you know what? We better make a dictionary. You know, it has the word, it has the pronunciation, has the definition. So what the Masoretes did was essentially create the final text, the text that you'll find in every Jewish synagogue. So then, of course, I shouldn't say then, remember that when we get to the 7th century, we've already been through the year 70 of the Christian era. The year 70 is when the second temple was destroyed. And the Jews are once again without a home. They are once again in diaspora from the year 70 on until today. They're in the diaspora. Well, I guess you could say after the Second War they came back to Israel. But one of the most profound things that happened when the Jews went into diaspora was that the tragedy of the destruction of the temple in 70 AD was the Jews lost their priests. They no longer had a religion that worshipped in a central place. You remember the stories of Jesus. You were supposed to go up to the temple every year, maintain this kind of ritual that gave meaning to your life. So you no longer had a central place to go, and you no longer had priests who ordered and carried out the worship. So the loss of the temple means there's no structure because the people were never in charge of it. They counted on the priest to kind of run their religious activities. The priests are gone now. The sacrificing in the temple is gone now. What we need to have is scripture. And so scripture becomes the central unifying element in the Hebrew faith. And who is going to teach that scripture, learn that scripture, pass it on? It's these new leaders, rabbis. So rabbis become profoundly important to the continuation of the faith. They're going to do the function that every pastor, every priest does. And so the rabbis, now by the 600s, have something that they can all rally around and all share together. They have a Masoretic text. And the other thing they have is something that the Christians chose not to do. And this makes Judaism extremely significant. They have what they called the midrash. The midrash. As the rabbis were getting pretty good at being rabbis, some of them stood out because in Protestant terms they were better preachers. They could look at the scripture and they could interpret it in ways that felt profound. And this profundity was not only remembered, but it was written down. If today you are a rabbi, you can go and read the words of rabbis from the 6th century, the 8th century, the 12th century. It's really hard to find Christian preachers, that you can find their words. Yeah. Yeah. When I lived in Paris some years ago, this congregation had a tradition that every Easter Sunday morning out on the flat land alongside the Seine River, they would send their most vulnerable pastor, the one who was youngest or least important, or the biggest sucker. They would send him out there, and they had preserved a sermon from the year 1000, from some Christian preacher in historicity whose name I forget anymore. That was me that year. And you had to read this sermon from the year 1000 to, you know, maybe 30 people gathered on Easter Sunday morning at 6:30 alongside the sin. It's just sort of my illustration of we don't do it like the Jews. They have their great teachers, their great preachers, and they write down what they what they did and they refer to it. If you've ever sat through a number of talks in a synagogue, you'll find there are, you know, there are rabbis from the past who will get quoted. And if you live in a Hebrew congregation long enough, you'll learn who some of them are. They'll kind of become a part of your life. So the rabbis have held together a faith for what is this now? 2,000 years. And synagogues are essentially the replacement of the temple. And they've done fine. They've done very well. Maybe if you lose your temple twice, it teaches you to go some other way. I'm not sure. But that essentially, in 35 minutes, is how they did it. So what questions does it leave you with?
SPEAKER_01:I don't have a question, but in the chosen, Jesus is called a rabbi by all the people. So it was teachings.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Who knows? Right. Probably is, may not be.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Yeah. Yeah. Do I understand correctly that in the um in the Hebrew you might have a word which was all consonants, which depending on context, might mean one thing in one place and something different in one place. It could even be that way. Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Especially when they were in diaspora and they lived a hundred years in Babylonia. And you know how language will sort of be all. Yeah. Sure. Wow. Sure. Now it isn't. Let me be clear about something that I hope I haven't confused you with. Just because they haven't appointed officially this vowel goes between these two consonants, doesn't mean that that sound didn't exist. It's just they hadn't a way to record it and they hadn't chosen to kind of freeze it in time and say, this forever will be the way it is. So all this oral history makes you think you don't need to do that. But after a while they realized they did need to do that.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. I'm glad you clarified that. I was thinking you can't talk without vowels. Yeah, you can write without vows, but I don't see anything you could say that would make sense. Without a vowel.
SPEAKER_02:I was never taught when I learned Hebrew why they didn't that. You were just supposed to memorize the words, I guess. Well, you know, if you're teaching a child to talk, I mean you don't give them the written word, you just teach them to say the words. And I suppose that was true then also. So they weren't worried about keeping things specific. But eventually, when you get them turning their own language into Greek and Latin before they even did their own, you know that that's pretty difficult to operate with. You get people from all over the known world coming, let's say they come from Alexandria to Rome, and the Jews in Rome are speaking Latin, and the Jews in Alexandria are speaking Greek. Neither one of them speaking Hebrew, it's it's an it's an interesting way to try to create finally a document.
unknown:Speak a little bit about the difference between priests and rabbis in terms of so the priests were gone and the rabbis, you know.
SPEAKER_02:The priests were essentially, we learn these words from the New Testament, the priests were essentially Sadducees. Remember Sadducees? They were a small group, of course. The first priest was Levi, you know, but the priests were Sadducees, they were a small group, their job was essentially to keep the temple running. The Pharisees were the supposed scholars, there were many more of them. They were more the leaders in the community. But when you take the temple, when you destroy the temple, there's no need for Sadducees. Yeah, absolutely. That's the way I should have put it.
SPEAKER_00:Their job was almost as much administrative as it was theological.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they they you heard the thing from 2 Kings, they collected the money, they read the scripture out loud, they organized the whole business of the rituals of sacrificing animals on the altar and which could be sacrificed and wasn't. I mean, you've read things in the Old Testament about how all these rules about how the sacrifices were supposed to go. That's all Sadducee stuff. But if you don't have a temple, if you aren't sacrificing animals, if you aren't collecting money, it's like you put them out of a job. I'm sure they didn't quite see it that flippantly. But that's kind of the reality. So that would leave it to the Pharisees, in a sense, to run the faith, if you will. But the Pharisees were they were just divided. They had, you know, they had a little too, they were too much of themselves, so to speak. And they they they didn't quite eventually rise to the top. What rose to the top was local leaders, and you know, eventually they were rabbis.
SPEAKER_03:Were the Pharisees chosen because of their faith? Were they born into it? Was it a status, a family status thing?
SPEAKER_02:All of those, yes. I mean, you've you you've got the kind of sense of it, wasn't exactly one thing, but you touched on the categories, which it was, yeah. They were considered to be experts, they were knowledgeable.
SPEAKER_03:But were they experts because they had demonstrated their expertise or because they were born into a family that established it were the experience?
SPEAKER_02:Well, both had expertise. Both because the original priests, way back before there even were Pharisees, the original priests were from the family of the tribe of Levi. Okay. And so there was a kind of sense that there is inheritance going on. But that isn't strictly the case. Is it uh do you think that Jesus read Greek from the Septuagint? No. Right. I don't think so. You know, it it the great irony is that Jesus lived and spoke Aramaic, and yet the whole New Testament is written in one language. Greek. Greek. Yeah. So there's a certain kind of, not sure what you call that. Unexpectedness, part of it, yeah. Yeah. But once again, well, let me say something about Paul, we can end on that. You recall that Paul was going around first before anybody, really. And so when these young churches were founded, they all spoke Greek, and if they had anything either to learn by ear or see written, it was going to be in Greek. And Paul quoted not the Masoretic text, Paul quoted the Septuagint. That was Paul's Old Testament, if you will. And what did I say 30 minutes ago about the Septuagint? Its accuracy had its limits. And so the more the Christian churches grew, and we're thinking of the Hebrew Scripture as being the Septuagint, the more problematic that became for the Hebrews. And also the more it meant that congregations of Christians made up basically as Jews had a tougher and tougher go of it. Because if they had learned Hebrew as their first language, and then they get Paul quoting supposedly Hebrew documents in Greek, and they don't match what they've learned in their Hebrew life, it's awkward. And so one of the reasons the Masoretes in the 600s start to do this great translation is because Paul had become a big problem. Paul had convinced some Jews that the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scripture, was what the Septuagint said, and it really wasn't. It was a bad translation. So the irony is the Jews finally closed their canon, said, This is it, we'll have these, because they needed to get a document that would work for them that couldn't be corrupted, that couldn't have people following Paul and saying, oh yeah, but it it says in Psalms this or that or the other. You see the problem? So it was a kind of self-defense. They had gone on a long time without needing a closed canon, but the Christians came along and inadvertently made life difficult. Made religious faith and scripture difficult. And so finally, some of the educated ones, over a couple of centuries, got it taken care of, and essentially the canon was closed, finished. Other questions? Oh, well, you have been the best audience I've had. Thank you so much for your being here. And Stephen wants to say a word about next Sunday morning where you all will be here, I'm sure.
SPEAKER_00:Next week, I'll be coming to week on 193. So if you have three times, I'll find out 193 or 50. Like head at the young. Um I'll write it up on the word. So if you don't mind, uh hit my G. Um, it's only like 85 meters long, so you can you can simply have meter and one sitting there if you want. Um so just invite you to do that sometimes. So again, thank you guys. Very well.