Understanding the Old Testament Through Ancient Eyes with Dr. John Walton

How should we read the Old Testament today? In this episode, Faithful Politics dives deep with Dr. John H. Walton, a leading Old Testament scholar and professor emeritus at Wheaton College. With decades of research on ancient Near Eastern contexts, Walton discusses why understanding the cultural river of the Bible’s original audience is crucial for accurate interpretation. From Genesis to the Pentateuch, he challenges us to rethink common assumptions about creation, divine community, and moral frameworks in the Hebrew Scriptures. Tune in as we explore how cultural backgrounds shape biblical authority and what it means to read the Old Testament as its ancient readers would have.

Guest Bio:
Dr. John H. Walton is a distinguished Old Testament scholar and professor emeritus at Wheaton College. He has authored numerous influential works, including "The Lost World of Genesis 1," "The Lost World of Adam and Eve," and "The Lost World of Scripture," which explore the Bible through its ancient Near Eastern context. Walton’s work emphasizes understanding Scripture as its original audience would have, encouraging modern readers to grapple with its historical and cultural frameworks.

Transcript

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Hi there, this is Josh Bertram. I'm your faithful host here on Faithful Politics. Thanks so much for coming in and tuning in guys. If you're joining us on our YouTube channel, make sure you like and subscribe to all the things that hack the algorithm so we can get this great content out to you like we've been doing it today. We have the great honor of having on our show Dr. John H. Walton. He is a renowned Old Testament scholar. and professor emeritus at Wheaton College where he taught for over two decades. Before that, he served as professor at Moody Bible Institute. Dr. Walton is best known for his groundbreaking work in ancient near Eastern backgrounds and biblical interpretation, particularly in Genesis and the Pentateuch. He's the author of numerous influential books, including The Lost World of Genesis 1, The Lost World of Adam and Eve, and The Lost World of Scripture. where he invites readers to understand the Bible through the lens of its original cultural context, whether he's writing about cosmic temples, functional ontology, or how ancient people understood divine revelation. Dr. Walton challenges us to take the Bible seriously by understanding it on its own terms. And I'm so thankful that you're joining us here today. Thanks so much for being on the show. Sure, great to be part of this conversation. Absolutely. So when we originally started thinking about this, my co-host, Will and I, who is not able to be here, he is the faithful host. What we were talking about is trying to get someone to help us understand how do we apply the Bible today. And so we were thinking about thinking in terms of like the whole of the Old Testament, the whole Bible, Old and New Testament sections of it. And then I, that's why I contacted you to kind of think about the Old Testament and in particular, maybe the Pentateuch and Genesis and we'll get into what those things are. But just to kind of like work through some of the big issues that people face when they're reading the Old Testament because modern readers, you know, including Christians, a lot of them that I've talked to, they can find like the Old Testament challenging to engage with. um Maybe they're put off by what feels like cultural strangeness in the Old Testament. these ancient rituals, these purity laws, violent narratives, social customs that seem foreign, right? They're even offensive to today's Western standards. So how in your expertise in your Eastern backgrounds and all the writing and research you've done on this, how do you think we ought to approach these kinds of texts? Like I guess fundamentally what role should the Old Testament play for contemporary believers and how do we kind of work through that? Maybe you can kind of set the stage for us kind of just with preliminary thoughts. know, our natural inclinations are to read it from our vantage point. I mean, the standard question that people often ask in Bible studies, what does this mean to me? But it goes well beyond that. um The people want to read the Bible as a theologian, or they want to read the Bible as a man or a woman, or as a Nigerian, or as an Asian, or an African. They want to read the Bible as uh LGBTQ or as an immigrant or a refugee. People want to read the Bible from their vantage point. And there's a good reason behind that because they really believe that God's Word is for them. And so that's a natural impulse. And we always want to know how this is relevant for us. But as you know, I like to say the Bible is indeed written for us, but it's not written to us. And so I would say before we try to read it from any of those various important vantage points, we have to try to read it as an Israelite. We have to try to read it as the audience would have received it. And that's a lot more work, because at that point, it's not just kind of imagining what this text might mean to me. Rather it's research to say what did it mean to them? And that includes what the words meant in Hebrew. We can't be satisfied with English words, though that's the easiest for us to work with. We have to figure out what that means in the literary context, the genres, the rhetorical devices that they use. It means we have to understand it in the culture into which it was delivered because culture is often in the background of communication. Yes, yes. not intuitive to us. And so we have these challenges before us that suggest that starting from our vantage point is not necessarily the most productive starting point. We need to try to start from their vantage point. So I call this a texting context approach. Also, I refer to it as tracking with the authors. trying to understand what they're trying to communicate to the audience that they know they've got in front of them. And those seem to me the reading strategies that have to begin our process. Eventually, we want to read from our vantage point, but it doesn't do us much good to read from our vantage point before we figure out what the message was in their vantage point. And that's the... approach that I recommend. And that seems to me to be the like, I hate to use the term common sense, but just kind of like, well, if you want to know something about what someone has written, like the first thing you want to know is why do they write it? Well, in order to answer that question, you have to kind of get into their mindset. Well, in order to get in their mindset, you have to know like, what did they have? What kind of conceptual framework? or like furniture, like selection, essentially do they have to construct these ideas that they're trying to get across? And the only way you can do that is by understanding their context. And one of the things that you talk about, which I think is so good is the idea of a cognitive environment and these environments that we have. that we connect with that we don't even know exist. Right. I mean, we live within them, but maybe they're subconscious. Right. They're subconscious. So like we have these ideas and these concepts and these underlying threads of in ways of thinking like individualism. Right. For instance, like that's just the water that we swim in. That's our cognitive environment. But they had a different cognitive environment. And that's why I referred to. us understand that. What was that cognitive environment? What were kind of the most striking differences do you think? Well, that's why I refer to it as a cultural river. You used the phrase, that's what we swim in. And so I use the metaphor of a cultural river to talk about the cognitive environment so that we understand that we're all in one. And the one we have in the United States is different from the ones we'll find in other places of the world even today. And certainly all of us are different from what was the ancient Near Eastern cultural river. And so we have to try to... to assess that, you know, part of it is we can make a lot of progress if we just realize the reality of that, that we do have a different cultural river. And therefore, it's important for us to try to push aside the things that we know are part of our cultural river. I mean, I wouldn't dream of going into Proverbs and looking for verses on social media. We know not to do this, but we do it in much more subtle ways. so those are some of the things, if we can just accept the truth of that enough to realize that we need to push aside our own as much as we can, we can't get rid of it entirely, we'll be making great progress. But then of course we've got the task of finding out about their cultural river. And that's a challenge as well, a different sort of challenge. But that's also a challenge. aspects of their cultural river, you already mentioned the idea that they find their identity in their community, not in their individualism. And that's something that we have to recognize. It affects biblical texts and the way they talk about things, the way they act, the things they do and why they do them. We can come up with... cultural reasons for why we do things, why they do things. That doesn't always mean that we can come up with motivations of the author of why he writes what he writes. With the authors, we're stuck with what they have given us in their literature to discern what they're about. So when I talk about authors' intentions, I always want to qualify that by saying we're talking about their literary intentions, their communicative intentions. I can't get inside their heads. I can't evaluate their motivations. I can't do psychoanalysis. We just can't do that. But we can believe that the literature can communicate effectively. But it's communicating effectively with its implied audience. And so we have to try to become part of that implied audience. So, the way they thought about themselves and their identity, the way they thought about the world around them, very differently from how we think about it, the way they thought about God or the gods, whether they had one or many, they still thought about the gods in similar sorts of ways. Some of the ways God was telling Israel they needed to stop thinking that way. But in other ways, they thought somewhat like the people around them. For example, We often think about polytheism as a question of the number of the gods. mean, even, our term says that, many gods. And so we think of the contrast between Israel and the people around them in terms of the number of gods. And on that, of course, Israel was supposed to think differently. But there's another aspect that we don't often consider, and that is just as the Israelites believe they found their own identity and community, people across the ancient world believed that the God's identity was likewise found in their community. And that's what polytheism is. It's a community of gods. And each God finds his or her identity in the community, their status, their role, their position, their tasks, all in reference to the community. And so for Israel, they didn't stop thinking about God in community. They couldn't figure out how to do that without having lots of gods. And that's the cognitive dissonance that they struggled with. How do you... Yeah. So how do you... How can you even think of a god if he doesn't have a community? Because that's how identity worked in their minds. And the really fascinating thing that Yahweh does in his revelation to Israel, first of all he says, I don't have a divine community. That's actually the first of the Ten Commandments. There is no other gods before me. I don't have a divine community. But then that, of course, is in the context of the covenant. And in the covenant he makes the most remarkable move in which he says, you are my community. You, Israel. or my covenant community, I find my identity in you, not in other gods. And I expect you to find your identity in me because I have adopted you as my covenant people. It's a remarkable step that certainly Israel continued to struggle with. But see, it has a lot to do with this concept of community identity. It's not just about the number of gods out there. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. It just reinforces this idea of reading something with ancient eyes. You know, we have our eyes that we view the world. And so much of what you're saying, we can look at their world and it's so easy for us to identify those things, right? As if we're looking back on it and we're seeing it objectively. And yet we obviously have our own modern lenses that we're bringing in and default frameworks that we're bringing in. Right. So we want to understand theirs, but we also want to understand ours. Right. So that we don't end up distorting the meaning of the text. How do you think that the assumptions that we bring um potentially distort what the biblical authors were trying to communicate? Well, we very naturally try to read the text from the vantage point of our own identity. So again, this is an identity question. Community, individuals, groups, communities of various sorts. So uh I can't read the text as a Nigerian. I can't read it as a refugee. But yet people want to read it that way. And so we can only read the text intuitively from the identity that we have. And for some people that means, so I read the text as a Christian, which itself has some problems when you're reading the Old Testament, because it wasn't written to Christians. And so they want to read it as a Christian. But likewise, I can't try to read the text as a woman. I have to let women help me understand that. And so... Again, trying to read the text from our own identity is what brings distortion, because our own identity is our most natural vantage point. so, you know, people want to read the text as a Republican or as a Democrat. Sorry, we just have difficulty putting on someone else's glasses and reading the text that way. If we are reading from our own identity, whatever it might be, then we risk distortion to the text because we're imposing ideas on the text that are foreign to the text. They may feel very natural to me, but again, that's not going to help me get the authority of the text. The authority of the text is in the author's intentions. That's what 2 Timothy tells us, that it's God breathed and it produces graphé, writings, text. And it's inspiration that fuels the concept of textual authority, and therefore it's authority that is in the texts. And therefore I have to read it based on what the author intended to say in those texts, which means my own identity is only gonna get in the way. I can't just take off my identity like a winter coat, but at least I can be aware of the problem. Yes, so you understand the problem, you understand that I'm going to bring my cultural assumptions to the Bible, right? So that's going to distort. And really, I I wouldn't even be able to make sense of the Bible at all if I didn't bring some of my cultural issues, right? Because even the ideas of father or mother, I mean, that's going to start with... the essential, my essential understanding of what that at like that relationship is in essence, even if it's different culturally, even now, the roles of fathers and mothers and wives and whatever like that at least gives me something to start my understanding to build on. Like, I guess my point is we have to make it like obvious, like our own presuppositions that we bring. We have to make them obvious. But that's not a bad thing that we bring them because that's the only way we can even start to understand. Okay, so that raises an interesting question. When I think about the ancient Israelites, one of the things that I've come to recognize is that for all the ways that God was trying to make them different than the Babylonians or the Egyptians, an ancient Israelite thought much more like a Babylonian than they do like me. Now, so that means if I'm going to try to unravel how an ancient Israelite thought, it makes more sense to start with Babylonians than it does to start with me. So the very things you mentioned, what do I think of when I think of a wife or a father or a mother? Those likewise, even though they are everyone's experience, they are not packaged the same way in different cultures. Right. I think of a wife as someone that I fell in love with, I chose to commit myself to, I married and I'm spending my life with, and I'm in a relationship that has certain elements to it that define that relationship. What was marriage like in ancient Israel? Well, in ancient Israel it was an arranged marriage. It was a decision among clans for the good of the clan. and love had nothing to do with it. And so they thought of their wives in very different terms. There was an exchange of funds in a marriage relationship and the people getting married weren't expected to love each other. Although maybe they would, maybe that would happen, but that's not the premise of it. So even when they thought about a wife, their minds are not thinking the same way that... Ours do. Sure, they experienced love, just like we do. They experienced sex, just like we do. They had wives. had husbands. Yes. But, I mean, that's just like the label on the backpack. It doesn't tell you what's in the backpack. And if we start assuming what's in the backpack, just because the label looks the same, we can be misled. Yes, I can see the ways in which you might be misled there, which makes me think about this idea of material ontology versus functional ontology. like we think about, like just thinking about the patterns of thinking that we have that we don't choose to have, they were given to us, right? Growing up in a Western education system, they were given to us. Is that fair to say? So we have this idea of a material substance beginning when we see something. Our first question is how did it get some kind of material like, well, it just popped into existence out of nothing. That question bothers us. Now, I'm not saying it wouldn't bother an ancient mind, but maybe they wouldn't even think about it or have the category to. It's more functional. So what is this? What's going on? What's the problem, the inherent problem here? Well again, so here the label on our backpack reads creation. Okay, but what's in the backpack? As you mentioned, for us, that's a very material kind of thing. We've got science in the backpack, whatever science we think. We've got science in the backpack, we've got materiality, we've got the idea that we believe that existence is in most cases a material category. These are all things that have been taught to us. And for many people, they don't even realize there could be other ways to think about it. And so we can't just assume that Israel thought the same way. You know, we ask the question, how did the world begin? Well, there many different ways to answer that question, depending on what your issues are. I think you're correct in the idea that in the ancient world, they just weren't that interested in that question. One of the examples I use of that is that if I talk to a group of students today and I say, tell me about your electronic device, they're probably not going to talk to me about the polymers in the screen or the chips on the motherboard. They're going to talk to me about their apps and their operating systems. It's not because they don't know that there are chips on the motherboard. Of course they do. But they're just not interested in it. They're not interested in chips. They're interested in apps. And so it's a matter of interest and focus and what story you want to tell. I use the example that if you walk into a play late and you ask the people around you, how did the play begin? One person could talk about a script being written, another person about the set being built, another person about the cast being chosen. And till you finally say, no, what happened since the curtains opened? Those are all good answers to the same question, but they represent a perspective. And so that doesn't mean all answers are true answers. It just means there can be several different perspectives on which you give an answer. So we can't assume that ancient peoples, especially ancient Israelites, thought about existence the same way we do, or that they would ask the same questions or seek the same answers. They were aware that there was a material world around them, just like people today are aware that there are chips on the motherboard of their computer. But when they ask the questions about their computer, that's not what they want to discuss. And likewise with the Israelites. When you ask them about material world, that's not what they want to discuss. Even there's places in Plato where he suggests that for the Greek people of his day, it was considered disrespectful to try to understand the material world. You are somehow imposing on an You're overreaching and imposing on the realm of the gods. That's Plato. Imagine going back further in the ancient world. So again, we have to recognize that they thought about things quite a bit differently than we do. Yeah, and I think that it's such an important perspective to have and think like you just need that tool in your tool belt because we have to understand, well I guess we don't have to and I guess that's part of the problem, but it would really behoove us to understand that there's a context from which these very ancient texts came from and we can understand ourselves. by understanding what's going on in their lives so that we can actually get what's being said. Like you said, like it's got this truth that's like locked up in it and we have to like it's the pleasure of kind of working through trying to understand it correctly so that then we can apply it correctly. And I think I would love to get your sense of when we're talking about the authority of the Bible, what is it that we're actually talking about there? And how does this contextualization of Scripture play into the discussion on biblical authority, or even questions of an air and sea, things like that? Well, our concept, as I mentioned, our concept of authority comes from inspiration. If it has its source in God, it has authority. That authority is vested not in my interpretation and not vested technically in the authors themselves, in the people. It's not the people that are inspired, it's the text that's inspired. But the people have produced that text as moved by the Holy Spirit, and so they've produced a text that has that authority in it. The authority is not just in any random way we might read those words. The authority is vested in what the author intended to communicate through those words. And therefore, if we're interested in biblical authority, we have to understand what they were intending to communicate. And again, the concept I use for that is tracking with the author. We need to try to understand what they're doing. If our applications and our sense of relevance does not connect to the message they were intending, then we're making it up and we don't have authority. It has to be, I use the term tethered, we have to be tethered to what they're doing. So we can't just start with what it means to me because what it means to them dictates what it should mean to me. And so in that sense, when we talk about authority, We're talking about authority as God's authority vested in human instruments. That was his choice of how to do it that way, and we can't second-guess him. So God's authority vested in these human instruments, and therefore if we want to be accountable to God, we have to be accountable to those human instruments. If we want to submit to God, which is what we do to authority, then we have to submit to those human instruments. And so our task as interpreters, if we want the authority scripture, is to track with those human instruments, because what they are saying is what God is saying. That's the issue of authority. So I hear what you're saying and I actually I mean I'm very sympathetic to that. I guess I'm thinking like if you have let's say some understanding of the truth and like is it that God gives the correct amount of contextualized revelation that the era needs for its own needs like I guess like like we're discovering more about the Bible, like do we understand it better than like people in 1850 did? But we, but in 1850 they had the sufficient, the sufficient like amount of revelation given to them, you know, that was sufficient for God's purposes. Does the question make sense? I'm like, I'm trying to kind of get at like, how does it evolve over time, I guess, as we discover more about it, like, ancient cosmology is it understanding because you know it used to be assumed like you know i don't know bishop usher you know right right that the bible essentially dictated science for a very long time and you know or at least there was a close relationship there right i'm sure there's a lot of give and take you know when you really investigate it but it's like kind of yeah go ahead the strongest interpretation is the one with the strongest evidence. It's not the one given by the most spiritual person you know. It's not the one given by the person who prays the most. It's not given by the one who has the most authority, clerically speaking. The strongest interpretation is the one with the strongest evidence. That by itself already implies that as new evidence comes to play, stronger interpretations are possible. that makes sense. And we have information about the ancient world, about Hebrew, about literary forms that people in 1850 didn't have. Certainly the people in 1650 didn't have. And certainly things that Augustine didn't have and Aquinas didn't have. They were doing the best they could with what they had. And that's the call to all of us to do the best we can with what we've got. And if we've got more evidence to work with, then it behooves us, to use your word, to use it. My editor told me once, John, nobody behooves anymore. Use something else. So at any rate, so yes, we do have information that they didn't have. I mean, it wasn't until just before the Reformation that Christianity came back to Hebrew, before that they're working with Latin texts. Right. That's going to have its limitations. And so we have much more evidence in all of those areas that are available to us today. And we should feel obliged to use them. They're tools that have been given to us. And to say, well, so-and-so didn't have those. So are we going to reduce our interpretation to the lowest common denominator? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I totally, I definitely agree with you on that. And I would love to like, to give a concrete sense of like, you know, where this makes a difference. I want to think about Genesis, right, as a book and then like Genesis one in particular. know you've done a lot of work on that. Like, where do we find some of these kinds of modern assumptions that we bring to the text? in something like Genesis 1 and where does understanding the ancient context help us sort that stuff through and really interpret it in a better way. Well, we've already talked about one of the main ones, that our assumptions tend to be leaned toward the material side of things. And I've tried to make a case, first of all, in the biblical text itself, but then second of all, in the ancient Near East broadly, that that material focus was not one that they had. When I first started exploring this, decades ago now, I was trying to think of an alternative word to use instead of material. What do I call this other perspective? And many of your readers and listeners who have read my work recognize that I used the term function, that it was about function, not about material. That actually is one of the more controversial issues when people... ask questions or express their confusion or did critical reviews that somehow didn't land with lots of people. And, you know, that's fine. So I went about trying to think of other words that maybe would land better, that would be clearer, that wouldn't have the problem. And the one that I use today is not uh contradictory. It's not a change of mind, but it's the word order. m So when I used to talk about functions, I talked about function meaning having a role and a purpose in an ordered system. So I used the word order. But in my more recent work, the word order has drifted to the top. And so the creation entails bringing about order. And in the ancient world, they viewed that as operating both on the cosmic level and on the social level. Bringing order was an act of creation. And that's where I... like Shalom? Shalom is in the, so I talk about terminology in the order spectrum and shalom is one of those. Rest is another one. Create, I think, is another one. Even the words we translate good and evil are more in the order spectrum than in the moral spectrum. And so when God said it was good, that was a comment about it was ordered. So once I locked onto that terminology, things started to click. even better. That was an idea that people could understand and it's an idea that can be found readily in the ancient Near Eastern literature. How important order bringing was and how that was the action of creation. so in that way, having terminology that we can use helps us to think about the Genesis one and the seven days a little bit differently. Of course, in the ancient world temple was in the center of order. The God dwelling in the temple, the temple was the center of both civic order and cosmic order. And the God was seated on his throne, ruling, bringing order. so temple was in the middle of it. And the posture of the gods in the temple was one of rest. And that's both in Israel as well as through the ancient world. And again, rest is when you've got an ordered system that you can say, okay, we're where we need to be. Now let's kind of work at maintaining it and even growing it a little bit. That idea of order. So kings were supposed to maintain order. Gods were responsible to bring order. They chose kings as the ones who would do that. And when this certain amount of order has been achieved, the god can rest in the temple on his throne. And so we learn a lot about this seventh day and rest. So these are all things that come out of Genesis 1 once we kind of get ourselves tethered to how they thought in the ancient world. I mean, I think that it's just so brilliant to start to piece things together like that. and it's amazing to me that our brains are able to make those connections as we get more and more information. Like we can piece together the story. We can make sense of it. We can get a framework that works, you know, and. One thing that I struggle with a lot in the thinking about the Bible, wondering how we read it, thinking about how it's represented in the broader culture when people think about the Bible and how to even like get in and understand anything about what it's saying. That's why so often people are having the Bible essentially interpreted for them, right? And obviously we know at a minimum it's going to be interpreted for us like through a translation. But even beyond that, um thinking about like a pastor that's going to interpret this or a writer that's going to interpret this or any speaker that's going to interpret this passage, like that's how people get it. And then this idea of what it means to be literal is really more of grandma's idea or you know, this theologian's idea, then maybe the concept should be, like, it should be more nuanced than maybe they were able to do. And so what does it mean that the Bible is literal versus non-literal? Like, are those terms helpful? Are they hurtful? What do you think? Well, like most terminology, you have to understand what the words mean in order to use them well and to understand them to make use of them. So, literal reading, what do we mean when we say that? Of course, the reformers use things like the plain sense of the text, which might be more helpful to us, but when we talk about literal meaning, take the person you know who is most defiant and intent on literal interpretation. When they read the parables, do they think, well gee, I wish I could go and interview the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son and learn more about this? No, they know that it's a parable and they read it as a parable. And that's a literal reading, even though they can't go interview the characters. And so it's recognizing rhetorical elements when they read God is my rock. They don't say, huh, igneous or sedimentary? I wonder, I better go find that out. Obviously not, that would be foolish and nobody reads the Bible that way. When it's used as a metaphor, they want to recognize it as a metaphor. And that brings us to the point to say, what we mean by literal reading is that we want to read it the way the author intended it to be read. So people who insist on literal reading, for instance, might tell me, no, you can't read the Bible, Genesis one that way, because um that's not what the author meant. Okay, wait a minute, are you sure? Have you examined that? Have you looked at the other possibilities? Okay, that's the only claim they could make. If they think I'm turning something into a metaphor that isn't a metaphor, well, now you've got a claim, but you've got to support that claim based on what the author intended. Okay, so it always goes back to the author's intent. so literal reading means reading it the way the author intended it to be read. I'm fine with that. As matter of fact, I stand by that. Yeah. So, and you know, it's interesting that some people say, well, I read the Bible literally. And at some point, it gets down to the idea that, well, if you want to read the Bible literally, Here's my Hebrew text. Let's go at it. Because reading English literally isn't always going to be a helpful lens for us to work through. Right. Like, what do we even mean by literal? And then continuing to kind of dig the tunnel of that definition and try to get more precise and understand and get that picture more accurate in our mind. know, and I would love to think about for a moment the way that we interpret ethical claims. Like say in Genesis, we'll read about you know, people marrying their brother's wife or read about some, you know, them going and killing Shechem, I think, and his relatives. And uh you'll read about, you know, fire flying down from heaven and consuming Sodom and Gomorrah and then different interpretations on why that happened. You read about like, you know, reptiles coming up and talking to people in one area, massive floods, right? So you're looking at this and there's so many different ways in which the modern mind thinks about this and not only like, I don't know if that's possible, but we'll like judge it as even brutal or like immoral even, right? And so there's a moral distance that we have with the Old Testament. what's the case for essentially reading it, the Old Testament within its moral framework? And then, do we take that and then translate it from that moral framework into ours? Is there a process for doing that, I guess? Well, it's very important to recognize that the text is operating within their framework of morality. And of course, different people have different ideas about how morality works. That's a huge argument in ethics and philosophy and all of those things. But there are opinions all across the board among Christians of how to do that. So for the Israelites, they would not have considered you shouldn't kill as somehow more of a moral statement than not to eat pork. To them, this is all about how you're supposed to conduct yourself with your identity in this society. And so when we read their text, we can't just say, these parts are moral and these parts are civil and these parts are ritual. They didn't sort them out that way. For them, they all had to do with order. order in society. And they didn't separate them into categories. And we shouldn't separate them into categories. We have to deal with the whole and figure out what's going on here. And that means we have to understand what they meant to them. So I have a book called The Lost World of the Torah, where I explore all of that, just like my other Lost World books, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest, where we explore all of the issues of what's called the Israelite Conquest. and of course my books on the lost world of the flood and the lost world of Genesis. So these are all books where I try to explore those backgrounds. Now lots of people respond to that and say, oh, so you're saying that I can't read the Bible unless I'm this big expert in ancient Near Eastern stuff in Hebrew and you're taking my Bible right out of my hands. Okay, let's imagine an analogy. Say there's a village. out in middle of nowhere in central Africa that has no water. And the people walk miles to get their water every day. And a group of people come in on a project to bring water to that community. And they're gonna pipe water from that water source and they're gonna bring it right to the village and then they're gonna put in pipes and bring it right to running water inside their houses. Okay? Now... I can't imagine those people in the village to say, oh, okay, so I see. Now you're making us dependent on plumbers. You're bringing us a problem that I'm gonna need a plumber to sort out my water and things will go wrong and I'll need a plumber and I have to have some expert to help me get my water. No thanks, I'll keep walking. You I can't imagine it. You know? So, so yeah, we have to think about what we're doing. Yeah, we have to. And the point, right, of the analogy of the metaphor is that, you know, we're expecting um things to be clear without having to do the work required to actually bring clarity. or that you might occasionally need the help of an expert. Yes, and you're going to need the help of an expert. There's no doubt about it. you want running water, if you want electricity, if you want to use a car, you're occasionally going to need an expert. No doubt. And you know, like, one of those things that's controversial, right, is when we start thinking about parallel texts with the Old Testament, right? And they all have parallel texts. It's all over the place, right? Which then again gets back to genre. It gets back to, you know, those forms of, and ways that they would try to present the information from their world in a way that their original audience can understand. And yet we're trying to come to this and understand it for us in the presence of parallel texts like flood narratives or creation narratives or, you know, any number of things, other Proverbs, other Psalms in other countries. I mean, in other cultures of the ancient Near East and then certainly like the epistles that are all over. the ancient world and people letter writing and all that. it's like we have all these parallels and yet somehow in our modern like maybe contemporary evangelical like view of the Bible is hard for us to reconcile with those other texts like we feel threatened by them in some way. And I guess I'd love for you to help navigate some of that fear and like say hey like We don't need to be afraid of these, we need to embrace it. So the Babylonians have a flood story. The Israelites have a flood story. We don't have to try to figure out em who got it from whom. It's just floating out there in the cultural river. The flood story is known. What's most important about the biblical text is the interpretation it gives of the event. Remember, it's text that's inspired here, and the text offers an interpretation of the event. It's not just trying to affirm that there was such an event. The Babylonians affirm there was an event, the Israelites affirm there was an event. Okay, they have that in common. But it's not the affirmation of the event that is the deciding factor. It's the interpretation of the event. And in that, of course, the Israelites have a unique perspective on what's going on in the flood. And so we have to recognize that our interest, since it's in the authority of the text, our interest is what the narrator is doing with events. It's not just in the event itself. The Bible's not trying to give us enough information so we can reconstruct the event. It's trying to give us an interpretation of the event. And it's the same with people. The narrator's not trying to help us get inside the heads of Abraham or Moses or Esther or Ruth. It's helping us to show how God used them. And so this becomes God's story, not their story. And we're not so much interested in what Abraham did or what Esther did. We're interested in what the narrator's doing with them. Because the narrator is carrying the authority in the text that he writes. And he's interpreting what they do and shaping it to his own purposes. And so again, we can't get to the people. We can't get to the events. We can only get to the narrator's records, but that's okay because that's what carries authority and that's what we're interested in. So it's kind of like, just to make sure I'm understanding it, like you have the text and that really is the only access we have to that event. We can't recreate it. We can't go back in time and access it. Many of the archeological, you know, any forensic evidence that might have been there is no longer there, you know. um or many times no longer there. mean, obviously we find things that help us kind of reconstruct. But if you imagine the amount of things that we've found versus the amount of things that have been lost to us, I mean, it's kind of depressing, isn't it? Like to even start to think about that ah because it just means that we'll never have the full picture. Even if we figure out everything in the future, we'll never have the full picture of the past because it's gone. ah But that shouldn't be a threat to us. This should be, this is the reality that we live in. We have, it's almost like seeing context as a gift and not a threat. All right, that's a good way to put it. And like, so like for the average reader, how can they, somebody who's like kind of listening in and they're like, yeah, but I don't know about this Genesis text. There are all these fundamentalist Christians that are like crazy and they're starting, you know, they're trying to read the Bible to understand the mindset of some of these uh fundamentalist Christians that like, know, six days and try to understand that interpretation. And they're looking. and like they happen to come across this, you know, this show because we've tagged it about Genesis. What do you recommend to someone reading the text? They're just coming to it. Well, I don't want to be critical of them because I was raised in that kind of context and I know what's going on. They are doing everything that they possibly can to defend the reputation of God's Word. I get it. I commend them for it. But we have to examine our methods to know exactly what we are defending and how we are to defend it. Yes, it has authority. So let's try to get at what's underlying that authority so we can understand it better, so we can profit from God's Word more faithfully. Those are the kinds of things we're looking at. So my advice is don't be afraid to keep digging. Don't be afraid to change your mind. After all, if the strongest interpretation is based on the strongest evidence, we have to always recognize that more evidence may come to the table, which means that we may have to change our interpretations. I've done it many times in my career. Hmm. faced with new evidence, I take a new position. And there's nothing wrong with that, it just means that we're open to the discussion. And so our commitment remains to the authority of God's word, our commitment remains to reading it faithfully as much as we can, and that means that we have to consider what evidence is before us. Now if people want to get into the whole world of the ancient Near East and the Israelite cultural river, there are resources that previous generations simply did not have. The one I usually... Sure. So to start with, I recommend the Cultural Background Study Bible, which... Okay, cultural background study Bible. All the study notes are about what we have called the cultural river. There are nice pictures and there are study notes to explain. So that's a great place to start. You've got all of that information right in your Bible. If people want to dig a little more, there's this five volume work that's under an Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary. goes through each book, each chapter, talking about the background information. Again, lots of wonderful pictures and descriptions. um so maps and charts and all kinds of things. So there are ample resources. Again, the Lost World series, my newest one in the Lost World series, New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis is launching April 15th. So... not even officially out yet on Amazon. But uh that brings the conversation up to date. And again, many other books in my Lost World series. InterVarsity has a Bible backgrounds commentary, one volume Old Testament, one volume New Testament. Again, plenty of resources that are accessible, that are affordable, and that help people understand this cultural river. I really love that. So what do you think is the most important thing for someone like, you know, pick up one of those resources, but what even just thinking about like their mental toolkit and how they think and how they process. What is one thing you would want to encourage like our audience to do when they're when they're picking up the Bible? They have to really be working from the commitment to track with the author and to realize that that's really what's necessary to get the authority of the text. You can read devotionally, and lots of people do, and I'm not complaining about that at all, you can read devotionally, but typically that's not a pursuit of the authority of the text. That's just trying to appreciate what God has done, who He is, what you can get there. That's great as far as it goes. But lots of people today want to be able to invoke the authority of the Bible, whether it's in their theology or in their various social issues, things of that sort. And if you're going to invoke the authority of the Bible, you have to have a sound method for discerning what the authority of the Bible says. And that's what we're trying to do when we track with the authors. Again, as we've mentioned, one of the first steps is to almost intentionally take off my modern lenses, to recognize that that can be a distorting factor. And as hard as it is to do, some people say impossible, I don't think so, but we can only do it to some extent. But then to try to dig into the resources to understand their cultural river. And basically, to... Require evidence. Requiring evidence for conclusions is different from requiring tradition for your conclusions. And many people are content to say, we've always thought this way. And that stands as their reasoning. assume it's Evidence comes in terms of linguistic evidence, what the words mean, literary evidence. how the literature is shaped and how it works, cultural evidence, how people thought in the ancient world, theological evidence. What was the theology of Israel like? For instance, they didn't know anything about reward or punishment in the afterlife. So I'm not going to read that into their texts. I have to understand their theological concepts. And that includes things like what I said earlier about polytheism and gods and community. That's part of the theology. Historical context. all of these issues, we're trying to read text in context. And all of these issues are part of the context. And they constitute the evidence that we bring to an interpretation. And so we're always open to new evidence. Always open to new evidence. And then how do you, and this will be my last question, how do you evaluate evidence? when someone's getting like, so they're scrolling through Facebook and they hit this, know, something that says, you know, dinosaur bones found, you know, and, know, 5,000 years old or something like that. You know, Genesis 1 proved correct or, you know, John Walton debunked. or something like that. What should they do? What are their next steps? Well, again, you want to start exploring what is the evidence behind that claim. You know, these dinosaur bones, they're supposedly 5,000 years old. So let's look at the evidence. They're making a scientific claim. It should have scientific evidence. What's that look like? Sometimes that kind of evidence can get above our heads easily. I don't have a lot of scientific aptitude. So if I get deep into a scientific argument, for instance, I read people that say that Geology proves a universal flood. Well, some of the people that are doing that are very highly qualified geologists and that discussion gets above my head real quickly. And it sounds like it's pretty good evidence. But then I read another geologist who can debunk it. I okay, I've got to get the battleground going here and see what evidence there is. So often, however, in our interpretations, we only get the conclusion. We're not told what the evidence is. And that's where we have to try to start digging. Yeah, like to get the evidence and the method that they used. Like to get an understanding of how not only, how did you get this evidence, but how did you make the connection between this evidence and the claim that you're making? And it's like, exactly. It's like, if we can just start to think in those ways, I think we would go a long way. Man, Dr. Walton, thank you so much for being on the program with us today. How can people connect with your work and what do you have coming up next? Well, all my stuff's on Amazon and of course the individual publishers have their websites. I do a lot of my work with InterVarsity or with Zondervan, done some with Baker. So people can go on websites or can go on Amazon. So I mentioned this book just came out or is just in the process of coming out. And in this, readers who have followed my work will see places where I've changed my mind on a couple things. This also has over 60 FAQs. that people relatively often ask me. I've got a two-volume commentary on Daniel coming out, first volume in November and second volume probably a year and a half or so later. So that's on the way. I'm also just finishing up a manuscript on a crisis of biblical authority. So I'm talking about those things. So a number of things in process. Well, that's great. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with us. Really appreciate it. And so to our viewers and our listeners, guys, thanks so much for joining us. Appreciate when you share this with someone you feel like could benefit from it. Appreciate all your support. And guys, until next time, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. Thanks and God bless.