Sorry, but I don’t have the footnotes for this tidbit from way back in my college days: I recall reading somewhere about an exchange between Hebrew and Greek philosophers. This was before Alexander the Great. In their discussion, the Hebrew men concluded that the Greeks had not progressed beyond juvenile thinking. To the Hebrew mystics, Hellenized assumptions about “propositional truth” sounded like something they would have expected from teenagers. It’s a focus on the fleshly nature.
One of the issues was the Hellenized reliance on binary logic. Every thought or statement was either factual or false. While Greeks did understand symbolism, for them it was limited to allegory. Thus, all symbols must be confined to a single, one-to-one representation of something concrete. The Greeks sneered at the idea of Hebrew parable because it could not be pinned down that way. Western scholarship is Hellenistic, so western thinkers keep trying to force the Bible into their logical categories.
The Bible is a Hebrew document, and Jesus was a Hebrew man. A Hellenized mind cannot understand His message.
Western theologians choke on the problem of verifying what they see as facts presented in Scripture. With our modern western scientific investigations, we can flatly disprove the Hebrew cosmology. For the Hebrews, near as we can tell, they regarded the sky as a vault standing over a flat earth. The problem is that we aren’t too sure they actually thought that way because Hellenistic minds insist that talking about it in those terms can mean only that one believed it as fact. In the Hebrew mind, it was a silly question, because they realized they couldn’t know the nature of such things. It was simply the common expressions they absorbed from the rest of the Ancient Near East.
Worst of all, to a Western mind, it seems as if God spoke in those terms. How could we have God asserting things demonstrably false?
Mike Heiser has his answer. It requires him a substantial amount of talk to get there. His answer boils down to mostly a matter of God not having much to work with when it comes to human scientific knowledge and the ancient Hebrew people. He does note that the Bible makes no attempt to address the things covered under modern science. He spends most of his time on the podcast addressing the concept of “inspiration” as it pertains to Scripture. He goes over the three basic views — verbal inspiration, limited inerrancy, inerrancy of purpose — along with a dismissive reference to absolutist dictation theory.
Eventually he gets around to questioning whether the concept of “errancy” even fits in this discussion. God chose those people with their peculiar worldview, etc.
I go a bit farther than Heiser did. God built that people and culture. He made them as the sole means for final revelation. They expressed things in terms He would have used without them. It’s not a question of God saying something that is factually in error. He spoke in parables about the things that mattered most. So it’s a matter of God expressing Himself in terms you must accept before you can join His family. You can’t drag your modern science into the Presence of God because it’s wholly impertinent.
The only question is that you bow in feudal submission and swear allegiance to His Son. That part is flatly stated without parabolic expressions. Digging into Hebrew cosmology misses the point. It is impossible to prove that they believed any of those expressions of cosmology literally. It’s highly likely they did not. Given the broader academic perspective of what we know about the Ancient Near East, the Hebrews never bothered to even think about it. They would not have cared about such things. What matters is your commitment (AKA faith) in the Messiah.
Most westerners can handle a call to allegiance and faith. That’s the starting place, the doorway to the Covenant of Christ. To rub elbows with the adults in the Kingdom of Christ requires you to grasp Hebrew mysticism and parabolic language. Theology that ignores the wealth of information available on the Hebrew mindset is just children’s Sunday School stuff.
