“Now therefore fear the Lord (T)
and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. (H)
Put away the gods that your fathers served (E)
beyond the River and in Egypt, (O)
and serve the Lord.” (S)
Joshua 24:14

40 Years of Harlotry

Israel famously wandered in the wilderness for forty years. They were tested, offered as a sacrifice and refined with the holy fire of the Law of Moses. This “threshing” process appears at the centre of the Bible Matrix. It is pictured as the time of harvest (Pentecost – the giving of the Law), and as the burning eyes of the Lampstand watching over Israel (sun, moon and five visible planets). In the Covenant pattern it is the “Ethics,” the bit where God lays out the rules for success. Threshing is also a biblical euphemism for sexual relations. At this point, under the Lawful eyes of God, Israel is either shown to be a faithful bride or an adulteress. Is the fire of her desire true or “strange” (foreign). We can see this pattern in James 1:15. It is a sick parody of the Covenant process because it begins with a “false word.”

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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ART: Burning of the Golden Calf by Moses, by Robert J. Tiess, blenderartists.org

Ignorant (willfully?) of ancient literary conventions, higher critics explained the carelessness of arrangement they thought was apparent in Old Testament books with fallacies like the JEDP theory. It turns out they were very wrong. James Jordan writes:

“Chiastic literary analysis has completely destroyed liberal literary criticism. Liberalism is in tatters, bleeding and dying. Liberalism cannot survive Dorsey’s chiastic proof of the total unity of Isaiah, for instance. Dorsey finds loads of 7-fold chiasms in the Bible. I’ve found scores more, quite independently. What Dorsey does not see is that these are recaps of the chiasm of the 7 days in Genesis 1. And that’s good, because it means he did not go through the Bible forcing passages into heptamerous chiasms. He just found them there, and others can see that these track Genesis 1 as “new creation” passages.” [1]

All of the books of the New Testament display the same phenomenal craftsmanship inherent in the Old. Post-exilic Jews were people of the book, as Christians are, and this flows into culture as literacy. The gospels, the synoptic ones at least, were written very early. They aren’t a later record of oral traditions and they weren’t written by trailer trash. They are high art, written by people of means.

“It is often assumed by people, though not by all scholars by any means, that the disciples of jesus were poor and uneducated people. This is not so, and it can be shown rather quickly that it is not.

First, we find that Matthew, Peter and John were capable of composing very sophisticated literary works that are right in line with the style and form of the canonical works of what we call the “Old Testament.” This means that they were aware of the stylised hieratic scribal Hebrew used in the Hebrew Bible and capable of joining in that flow of writing. So also were Mark, Luke, Paul, James and Jude.” [2]

The Jews examined their Scriptures very closely. They turned them inside out and upside down and still do. The crowd at Biblical Horizons have done this with the New Testament and discovered the same literary structures.

Perhaps the Old Testament and New Testament departments in Bible colleges and seminaries ought to talk to each other more often, and drop the false critical paradigm that maintains the authors of Scripture, and their writings, are “encultured” and therefore must be analysed with blinkers on. [3]

Jordan despises the Old/New Testament division and rightly so. The 400 year gap between Malachi and Matthew is in reality no more significant (or just as significant, typologically) than the gap between Joseph and Moses, and the later ones.

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[1] James B. Jordan, A Reply on the Nature of the Psalter, Biblical Horizons blog, biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com, referring to David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament. Dorsey’s book is a must-have for reference.
[2] James B. Jordan, Getting Real in the Gospels, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 205, October 2009. Subscribe at www.biblicalhorizons.com
Jordan goes on to discuss the great evidence for the disciples, apostles, and indeed Joseph and Mary, being upper middle (working) class. 
[3] See Threshing the Text.

It was always God’s plan that Israel have a human king:

“When you come to the land which the LORD your God is giving you, and possess it and dwell in it, and say, ‘I will set a king over me like all the nations that are around me,’ you shall surely set a king over you whom the LORD your God chooses; one from among your brethren you shall set as king over you; you may not set a foreigner over you, who is not your brother.” Deut. 17:14-15

Like Adam, this dominion would only come by obedience: by servanthood to God and faithful mediatory witness to the Gentiles. But like Adam, they seized dominion and demanded “a king like the Gentiles.” With Saul, they had a king who palled around with Agag of Amalek whom Moses commanded to wipe from the face of the earth.

“Therefore it shall be, when the LORD your God has given you rest from your enemies all around, in the land which the LORD your God is giving you to possess as an inheritance, that you will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. You shall not forget.” Deut. 25:19

I have already disputed with some who say that there was no restoration after the captivity; that the Babylonian exile in practice lasted until the time of Christ. But the Covenant was restored, the Temple rebuilt, and Israel’s priestly territory expanded to the size of an empire. With Daniel and then Mordecai at the king’s right hand, the kingdom of God was another step closer to “heaven,” as James Jordan points out.* The cruciform Tabernacle of God would cover all four points of the compass. The “times of the Gentiles” were actually a step closer to the kingdom of God.

But, as with Joseph, the days came when emperors ruled who didn’t know Mordecai. A restored Israel again forgot her mission and ended up in a bondage lasting 400 years – the time between Malachi and Matthew. This period was not an extended exile. It was not extended punishment for the disobedience of Israel’s kings. It was the consequence of rebellion against the restored Covenant of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai and Zechariah.

As in the time of Samuel, Israel demanded their own king—a king like the Gentiles. And they got one: Herod the Edomite. Blind “Isaac” once again tried to hand the Covenant over to Esau. Not only was Herod the wrong ‘son,’ he was Abimelech, Saul, Jeroboam and Pharaoh all rolled into one. Yet those who want to identify antichrist overlook this false Messiah. Look no further.

“Then the king shall do according to his own will: he shall exalt and magnify himself above every god, shall speak blasphemies against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the wrath has been accomplished; for what has been determined shall be done. He shall regard neither the God of his fathers nor the desire of women, nor regard any god; for he shall exalt himself above them all.” Daniel 11:36

*James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall, p. 260. Available here.