Moses as Scholar

Posted on October 25, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 103: Moses and the Bronze Serpent

I’m a little irritated by this podcast; the reason will seem obscure to some folks. Bear with me.

Lots of believers today appear to find the fiery serpent narrative in Numbers 21 disconcerting. He wastes the first third of the hour-long discussion on something that was totally unnecessary. He attacks the notion that Moses produced Genesis as a way of suggesting that the people of Israel weren’t aware of any part of Genesis. In doing so, he comes dangerously close to the Straw Man fallacy.

Heiser confuses conservative biblical scholarship with fundamentalism. Let’s be clear: I’ve been a fundamentalist and I’m still somewhat conservative, and there’s a huge difference between the two. Heiser describes a position that is closer to fundamentalism than the conservative scholarship I still tend to agree with. His primary purpose is to assert that the nation of Israel was likely ignorant of the material in Genesis, particularly chapter 3. I’m not sure why he reads a modern western confusion back into the Nation of Israel.

I’m often just a little saddened that Heiser doesn’t give credit to people like Moses, whom I assume would be just as clear-headed and scholarly as people like Heiser, and maybe more so. Heiser builds an argument that doesn’t hold water. He talks about how we today look back with the knowledge of Genesis 3 in our heads about the Serpent in the Garden when we come to Numbers 21 and the Bronze Serpent. To be honest, among the thousands of church folks I’ve known, not one of them suffered the confusion he seems to think is so common today. Then he proceeds to insist that the people of Israel weren’t likely to know that story.

He doubts that Moses would have had access to the material in Genesis. He has no problem with the likelihood of some kind of oral lore, but he would exclude Genesis 3 in particular. This becomes a poor excuse for choosing to believe that Genesis was written in Babylon during the Exile, that Moses didn’t compose it. He adds that there is no hint of the very recent Egyptian experience in the writing of Genesis. Does he imagine Moses was unable to distinguish between his early education in Egypt versus his later education in the home of Jethro? Jethro’s religion was distinctly Mesopotamian and he was a descendant of Abraham.

I don’t have trouble with the idea that Genesis was edited later; I’m quite certain we do not have what Moses originally produced. However, I believe Moses was responsible for the substance of the narrative. At least a part of what happened on the mountain with God over the forty days was to help Moses sort out his oral background from both Egypt and Babylon. For that matter, I am fully convinced Moses was a scholar whose intellect was at least on par with anyone living since then (except Solomon). It is silly to raise doubts about Mosaic authorship in the first place to explain how people are confused today. This is needless background discussion that serves little purpose, and in the end he waffles after ripping into conservatives.

I never had trouble with Jesus’ use of the Bronze Serpent narrative as a symbol of His crucifixion. I agree lots of ordinary church folks choke on that, but my explanation has not changed in a couple of decades. We should not see the image of serpents as unmitigated evil; the idea of using an image of a serpent in healing snake bites and warding off snakes (and other evil) was common across the ANE. That had nothing to do with what Jesus said.

Further, that God would command Moses to use what skeptics call “sympathetic magic” (using symbols of the thing you want or want to avoid) is poorly addressed in this podcast. Yes, it sounds like he comes out on a good side, asserting that if God commands it, your faith and obedience makes it work. I’ve known for most of my life that we don’t need to explain how it worked. I agree such practices would have been familiar to the Israelites and anyone else in the ANE. But he makes it sound like God is falling back on something merely cultural to get people to follow Him, as if God Himself was humoring them in their ignorance. I find that rather insulting to God and His revelation.

Jesus didn’t command the sea to calm down simply because His disciples were used to such an idea. Indeed, they were stunned. No, it’s because it touches on something fundamental to the nature of reality itself. Heiser would never understand that because he remained an essentially western man with western assumptions about reality. He didn’t embrace the Hebrew outlook he seems to have understood. But the Hebrew understanding of reality is all the more true in Jesus’ teaching about how the Bronze Serpent is symbolic of His final act as a human.

Having a better, more elite western viewpoint doesn’t solve the problem of ignorance about the Bible. It wasn’t merely a question of throwing Genesis 3 into a blender with Numbers 21 and making a mess. It’s not that hard to understand if you take the time to explain it to church folks. Hezekiah destroyed the Bronze Serpent because his people were confused about the symbolism for an entirely different reason. We need to take action about the source of confusion that our own people have.

The rather prolonged ending of the podcast is relating some of the goofy notions about the meaning of Melchizedek and the symbolism of Jerusalem as the center of the world. We should hardly be surprised when secular minded people get that stuff wrong. We should also be disappointed when someone like Heiser rejected ancient wisdom.

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The Great Swap

Posted on October 18, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 102: What does “All Israel will be saved” Mean?

Church folks who ignore the Second Temple literature, particularly how it interprets the OT, will build a theology that is utterly rootless and alien to the New Testament. Thus, we end up with all kinds of competing nonsensical theories about what passages like Romans 11:25-27 mean:

For I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: A partial hardening has happened to Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: “The Deliverer will come out of Zion; he will remove ungodliness from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.” (NET)

Paul quotes from Isaiah and Jeremiah here. Heiser takes from a couple of outside sources a list of four common views of this passage and the meaning of “all Israel”. The problem is that Heiser’s explanation takes too many liberties interpreting this source material. You can read those sources and get a different idea than what Heiser offers in his summary. But we don’t need to examine the counterfeits, just make sure we understand the approach taken in Second Temple literature based on the Old Testament.

(Heiser quotes from another source no longer easy to find — Jason Staples in the Journal of Biblical Literature — but I’ll share the copy I chased down with anyone who asks for it.)

There is a distinct link between Paul’s mention of the “fullness of the Gentiles” and “all Israel”. You cannot get one without understanding the other. Part of the problem is the general lack of precision in the term “Israel” among theologians and church leadership.

Even in the common vernacular of today people have noticed an intentional ambiguity with the word “Jew”. Is it a religion or an ethnic identity? Worse, neither of those is consistent with the meaning in the New Testament. The NT use of that term refers to a national identity. It’s a contraction of Judean — someone who is a citizen of the Judean Kingdom under the Roman Empire. They may or may not be faithful to the Covenant, but they are subject to Judean government jurisdiction. This no longer exists, so the ambiguity in the modern usage does not apply here.

Thus, whatever Paul means here in Romans 11 by “Israel”, it’s not the same as ethnic Jews or religious Jews. We have a hint in Paul’s declaration in Galatians 3 that “children of Abraham” refers to those who carry on Abraham’s faith, not those who simply carry his DNA.

What can we learn by working with Second Temple literature? The name “Israel” can be used to indicate several different things, which is typical of the Hebrew language in general. It depends on the context.

1. The Patriarch, Jacob — his name was changed to Israel
2. The nation of his descendants (“Children of Israel”)
3. All Twelve Tribes
4. The Northern 10 Tribes and sometimes their territory
5. In some places it refers to the Southern Tribes, usually after they returned from Exile

The word “Jew” is regarded as a term originating outside the nation. It’s not a name they chose, but they might use the term in the presence of outsiders to accommodate them. It’s a specifically exilic term; it arose as a reference to them as captives of Babylon, even after they returned. In Hebrew and Aramaic, it’s a plural: Yehudim. 2 Kings 25:25 or Jeremiah 34:9 seems to be the earliest, but it’s used throughout Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. You also see it in Daniel and Zechariah, both after the Exile began. (Keep in mind that the Exile occurred in three waves — 605, 597 and 586 BC — so Jeremiah mentions them after at least the first wave.)

Heiser notes that Josephus is very precise about the meaning and usage of the term and quotes him using the Greek form Ioudaioi, referring to both the people and the territory. As to the people, it refers to everyone descended from the Returnees. Modern usage of the term “Jew” arises more from the Fourth Century and later. Frankly, we should view the word “Jew” in English translations of the Bible as bad scholarship. It’s better to translate it as “Judean”.

The term “all Israel” shows up 153 times in the Bible, but only once in the New Testament — where Paul uses it in Romans 11:26. It specifically refers to the collective Twelve Tribes in both the Old Testament and in Second Temple literature. Not just the people, but specifically to the tribal structure of the nation. The concept of the term fades from meaning between the Divided Kingdom and the Exile. The precision of meaning shows up in the Qumran Community and in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So, Paul is not thinking in Romans 11 about ethnic Jews. There was already a proper term for that. No, he refers to “the totality of God’s covenant people” as Heiser puts it. It’s a theological construct. As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s Israel-the-mission, a people who serve a specific purpose as noted in the Unseen Realm thesis. Heiser takes us back in the Roman letter to 9:6-8, which includes a quote from Genesis 21:12.

It is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all those who are descended from Israel are truly Israel, nor are all the children Abraham’s true descendants; rather “through Isaac will your descendants be counted.” This means it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God; rather, the children of promise are counted as descendants. (NET)

This is consistent with Galatians 3:7-9, 25-29. Paul bluntly states that “Children of Abraham” includes Gentiles. Anyone with that fundamental loyalty to Jehovah, the OT is loaded with Gentiles who qualify: Rahab, Naaman, etc. The same answer carries over into the NT. Acts quite deliberately points out that the same Holy Spirit fell on Gentiles the same way.

Jeremiah 30:3 refers specifically to “Israel and Judah” who will return some day. God refers to “My People” against the warnings in Hosea 1:9 that the Northern Tribes were “not My People” (lo-ammi). Later Hosea says that those who were formerly “not My People” (Gentiles) will be called “My People”, and Paul quotes this in Romans 9:22-26. Paul is swapping the Lost Ten Tribes for Gentiles.

This is how “all Israel” will be saved.

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They Despise Us

Posted on October 17, 2025 by ehurst

You may be familiar with the term “geofencing” — a technique used to identify targets for an advertising campaign. Some agency will mark out a territory wherein they want to harvest targets for their ad campaign in the belief that mere physical presence indicates an interest in what they are selling. If you happen to enter that area carrying your cellphone, your number will be recorded and added to the list. Cell towers in that area will sniff for what apps you use that can relay their ads and you will be targeted through those apps with advertising.

Israel has decided to use this invasive technique to target church-goers with their propaganda. They have assembled a list of specific churches in certain areas of the southwestern US for geofencing. Cellphone numbers that pass through those church properties will be placed on a list for targeted ads in support of Israel and against Palestine. Oh, and some pastors are marked for receiving stipends to include the propaganda in their message.

Keep in mind: Jews hate Christians. It’s part of the Talmud and their ethnic culture. They love the money and cannon fodder, but hate our faith. They’ll be nice as long as it pays off, but they despise us as a doctrine of their religion, Gentiles in general and Christians in particular.

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Just the Beginning

Posted on October 13, 2025 by ehurst

Time for some clarifications.

The Covenant of Moses ended at the Cross. God’s covenant relations with humans were moved to a different kind of covenant, a spiritual covenant under His Son. There would no longer be a nation belonging to God while all the other nations were parceled out to the Divine Council. God was taking His “nation” from among all the world, robbing the elohim who had misled them. Instead, the Devil and his allies have all human nations (minus the Elect).

There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that allegiance to Christ was a rejection of human national identity. Jesus flatly stated to Pilate that His Kingdom was not of this world, but Rome clearly understood that any of their subjects following Christ no longer gave their highest loyalty to Rome. Christians did not deny this, as if to blunt the fury of Rome, but affirmed it openly. Roman soldiers called to Christ typically ceased wearing their military headgear as a symbolic gesture that they belonged first and foremost to Christ. They would continue serving and executing Roman justice, but only as if they were on loan from the higher authority of Christ.

Caesar was not god.

At the same time, Christians knew that God would not destroy Rome for a long time to come. It appeared to be a universal conviction, spoken by the Holy Spirit, that there was nothing they could do about Roman persecution aside from hiding or fleeing as they felt led.

Today we have the US government, pretending to leave your conscience free to follow Christ. The statements of our government claim not to seize the throne of God, only of men. However, in practice there is little distinction in what the US demands in practice versus ancient Rome. More to the point here, various political agendas and ideologies most certainly do assert themselves as deities for ultimate faith and loyalty.

In particular is secular leftism. In all its forms — Marxist, communist, socialist, woke, etc. — it proclaims there is no God, and humans under its care can have no other loyalty on any level. They take the same approach as Rome did: the state is your god. Unlike Rome, the Holy Spirit has not universally decreed to our convictions that there is nothing we can do about a leftist government here in the US. Rome had God’s permit for a time; a leftist government in the US has no such permit.

Christians should feel free to resist a leftist government in the US. There will no doubt be consequences to follow any such resistance, but the principle is there. Follow your convictions. While the gullible point to Romans 13, they forget to read the second half of that chapter, which clearly states that our first duty is to the Law of Christ to love our covenant brothers and sisters — that kind of love “is the fulfillment of (human) law”. We also play along with the bogus demands of secular governments regarding material things (taxes, revenue, respect and honor) on a human level. There is no divinity in human government. We must not yield to demands that transgress Christ’s Law for us.

We have in the US a broad tent of ideology what we call “globalism” that represents a flat and honest rejection of Christ as our Lord by simply rejecting the existence of any spiritual realm. They use the rhetoric of faith, but only when it suits their agenda. The leaders of this beast regard themselves as demigods, and clearly reject any higher loyalties.

Under Trump, we are given the impression that their time has passed. Let me assure you, the mid-term elections will show otherwise. They are resurgent mostly under the label of Democratic Socialists, and with the support of Antifa. Trump has so far been unwilling to do what it takes to crush them, though he talks a good game. There is no doubt he will make some progress, but I’m convinced he will waffle too much and only encourage them.

I don’t fear their resurgence where I live. Whole portions of the US are simply too dead set against them. I doubt my personal resolve will be tested much. However, I think many will be quite surprised at where they pop up in the coming year or so across the US. I fully expect them to challenge, not just Trump, but the entire range of conservative-leaning Americans. I believe the threat is very real that they will institute wholly intolerable policies wherever they can. Life will become very hard under their bootheels.

People can see this, and many are predicting a civil war. I find it wholly likely. We will have some economic troubles, but the real problem will be with the chaos of government infighting. I suspect that this conflict will give rise to a Zionist fascism unseen anywhere before.

We’ve said it before: The US is not Rome. There are overlapping features, but God has already decreed that the US must fall. He alone knows His timeline for that, but there’s no doubt about the moral truth behind events on the ground. Neither the globalists nor the nascent fascists will be granted a divine commission to rule for any significant length of time. Test your own convictions; I’m convinced that God will not give any prophetic warnings regarding these events, only the general warnings any of the Elect should sense in their own souls.

I suggest you worry less about defending property and any imaginary rights, and focus on fighting for the authority to confess your convictions and live accordingly. Consider in advance where you might draw the lines, but be flexible in context. For myself, I know already that I will reject any medical injections or procedures that reflect an intent to rewrite DNA, for example, like the COVID shots and any of the new therapies based on the same mRNA technology. I would resist to the point of killing people who tried to force it on me.

I would also take up arms against genuflecting before the Israeli flag and all that represents. Taxes and so forth are not the issue; I won’t offer incense to Caesar’s bust, if you will. I’m sure there are other spiritual insults I’d resist with force, but I can’t predict what they might be. What I do know for certain is that testing will come, and it will be accompanied by social and political chaos, along with a fair amount of economic distress. Crime and disorder will rise substantially; that’s already happening.

This is only the beginning of sorrows.

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If We Must Act

Posted on October 12, 2025 by ehurst

We warned some years ago that the only way conservatives can survive in America would be to violently purge the government — at all levels — of leftists. Not just government, but the same purge must happen in media and academia. Anything that resembles dialogue and compromise is impossible simply because the left rejects all boundaries hindering their agenda. Sooner or later they will seize control and commit violence against anyone who opposes them. This is a fundamental doctrine of leftism. It’s kill or be killed.

And a substantial portion of lefties won’t wait until they have control; they will unleash violence to gain control: ANTIFA’s Mask Slips: Trump’s Roundtable Sends Shadow NGO Network Behind “Riot Inc.” into Panic; and Antifa Is Threatening Families Of Law Enforcement: Homeland Security.

Hebrew language had only nouns and verbs. Some of you may recall I once explained the concept of “evil” in Hebrew culture. It was not an adjective or adverb, but a noun, a condition resulting from something else. It was a matter of effects, and it was subjective. What has an evil effect on you may not be evil to someone else because it doesn’t threaten them in any way. Calling someone “evil” would be more about what they accomplish against you personally as you reckon what response you may have, if any.

The Hebrew word (chamash) — typically translated “violence” — is similar. This one is a verb. The image is someone grabbing you and shaking you very hard. By extension, it would include any number of actions that have the effect of shaking your health, wealth and safety. It could be simply words that cause distress — false accusations, for example. It is associated with oppression, injustice, wicked intent, etc.

I want you to notice that “violence” in the Bible is not defined legalistically as it is in American culture. You don’t sin by beating or killing someone trying to rape your wife or daughter. That’s not “violence”; it’s defense. At a deeper level, the difference between American and Hebrew culture should be obvious.

Westerners say that “life is precious”. They mean that taking life requires all kinds of special permits and vested authority, with a ton of training to match. Even then, there’s a big show of investigating every fatal outcome to make sure it was all proper. In a great many local jurisdictions, defending your life or that of your family is not a valid reason to kill someone. You would owe government officials a whole bunch of explaining and proving to escape punishment and the odds are against you.

Acts of war are reckoned separately, an entirely different category. You are under orders to go kill the enemy. It’s not the same as domestic disputes.

While the Law of Moses also demands an investigation, the barriers to escaping condemnation weren’t too awfully high. The underlying concept is that your actions must not threaten covenant shalom — peace with God. But the idea that every life is precious is wholly absent from Hebrew thinking. Sure, your life might be precious to some folks, maybe even to God, but your demise might not be a tragedy to the community. If you were outside the Covenant boundaries, you were likely asking for it. Neither the community as a whole, nor any faceless bureaucratic government as a proxy for the community, has a vested interest in your continued existence.

This is the crux of the matter: Our government claims to represent the will of the people, when it has only rarely done so. Once in power, it’s not even the bad people — it’s a wicked system of mere pretense. The government claims a vested financial interest in every human life, as if the whole matter was reduced to economics. This trumps all other considerations. Thus, it has nothing to do with actual morality and peace with God, but whether the government deems the person’s life valuable strictly in terms of dollars.

Covenant people cannot reckon things that way. We know that the most horrifying terrorist thug is no doubt precious to someone out there, but that is not our concern. They are a threat to what God has given us. We must bear the question before the Lord, asking how He wants us to respond. Some of us are called beforehand to prepare to defend the covenant community. Whether or not we defend others who may or may not contribute to our shalom is a question for the context and conviction. Does it glorify God in this moment?

The point here is that human lives are not inherently precious. Taking someone’s life for any reason is not subject to material calculus, but is a matter of the moment, and we should not hesitate when that moment comes. We have a duty to God to demonstrate His value system, not the one promoted by godless government arising from pagan culture.

We won’t support the likes of ICE and other federal law enforcement for their own sake, but we might get involved in their favor accidentally because we oppose leftist terror. Somewhere down the road, we may turn our weapons in the other direction when government-sponsored Zionist terror becomes a problem.

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Jesus on the Tribulation

Posted on October 11, 2025 by ehurst

If you have a broad and clear grasp of Old Testament history, then you should be able to dive right into Heiser’s stuff and be able to stay afloat. Most people lose track because all they know about such history is the events recorded in the Bible, and they are often pretty shaky about that. They are often not well informed on those events between Malachi’s prophecy and the birth of John the Baptist.

We don’t need to recount the entire Maccabean Period, but there are some items that most people don’t think about when they read the New Testament, the Gospels in particular. The Maccabean Revolt destroyed the biblical order of government for Judea. The Maccabees were a minor priestly family, not even part of the higher priestly clans. They led a revolt that pushed them to prominence such that the royal family ceased to rule at all. The Maccabees did not displace the High Priesthood; they displaced the royal family.

Thus, you hear mention of the Hasmoneans, a reference to the Maccabees and their surviving heirs who became rulers-in-effect. They were the ones to subdue the Edomites and force them to convert to the Covenant of Moses at the point of the sword. But the Edomites had their own ruling families, and when the Herod clan rose to prominence, they forcefully married into the Hasmonean clan to become Judean royalty.

This was all in the back of the disciples’ minds when they kept asking Jesus about restoring the Kingdom under Moses. Jesus was teaching the accurate meaning of Moses and was also of the ancient royal family of David. Herod himself was paranoid about a restored monarchy under someone like Jesus. His heirs were mixed about the paranoia, but the Romans were very worried about it, because they know the history. The Roman imperial court rather liked the Herodeans and wanted to keep them in power.

Jews zealous for restoring the Kingdom of Israel had some expectations about what any promised Messiah had to do. More than restoring their materialistic vision of shalom, they had some very substantial expectations about what that restoration would mean. You see, the Northern Ten Tribes were not home yet. As far as Jews were concerned, they were still in exile. Yes, they had a problem with the Roman imperial government interfering in everything, but that was not such a big issue against the restoration from exile. This is what “all Israel must be saved” meant to them (Romans 11:25-32). Paul said it would happen after the Gentiles came into the Kingdom.

They did not quibble about the Gentiles being saved and brought into the Kingdom. However, that could not happen without the restoration of the Lost Tribes of Israel. This is what was really behind the tumult when Paul mentioned going to the Gentiles on the steps of the Roman fortress (Acts 22). To them, it sounded like he said he would go to the Gentiles without going to evangelize the Lost Tribes.

Keep in mind the fundamental question of who is “Israel” under Christ. Paul said in Galatians that Israel is those who have the spiritual DNA of Abraham, not his physical DNA.

Now it will make more sense when you examine the questions Heiser raises in his podcast: Naked Bible 101: Jesus, the Exile, and the Tribulation and the one following.

In the first one, Heiser points out the problem of evangelicals forcing a literal reading of the prophetic texts when they would not use that approach anywhere else in their lives. English is notorious for figures of speech and metaphors. Why must they force that approach on a Hebrew dialog when Hebrews were even more mystical in their use of language? As previously stated, the key is to understand how the Jewish writers of the Second Temple Period looked at things, because Jesus and the New Testament writers would have started from that body of understanding.

Heiser notes this is actually a new thing in academia, something that came into prominence only in the past 20-25 years in the Biblical Studies community in regard to eschatology. Here’s the list of items the researchers found:

1. The tribulation is tied to the restoration of Israel and the End of the Exile.
2. A righteous remnant arises during the tribulation.
3. The righteous suffer and/or die during the tribulation. This sometimes includes the suffering and/or death of a messianic figure.
4. The tribulation is tied to the coming of a Messiah, sometimes referred to as the “Son of Man.”
5. The tribulation precedes the final judgment.
6. The tribulation is depicted as the eschatological climax of Israel’s exilic sufferings, often through the imagery of the Deuteronomic covenant curses.
7. The tribulation has two stages: (1) the preliminary stage, and (2) the Great Tribulation.
8. The tribulation precedes the coming of an eschatological kingdom.
9. An eschatological tyrant, opponent, or anti-Messiah arises during the tribulation.
10. Typological images from the Old Testament are used to depict the tribulation.
11. The tribulation is tied to the ingathering and/or conversion of the Gentiles.
12. The tribulation has some kind of atoning or redemptive function.
13. The Jerusalem Temple is defiled and/or destroyed during the tribulation.
14. The tribulation precedes the resurrection of the dead and/or a new creation.

We can see that this sounds a lot like the NT view. However, we can note that the OT prophets said Judah would be restored, but don’t mention the Northern Tribes in that promise (example: Jeremiah 30). Thus, the restoration of the Lost Tribes is pushed out into the far future. Meanwhile, the time of Jacob’s Trouble will be severe, echoed in places like Daniel 12 and sounds like Jeremiah.

The point is that Jews were convinced that the appearance of the Messiah must mean that the exile of the Lost Tribes was ending. Moreover, the Diaspora would have to return, as well. That Jesus offered no solution to this problem is part of their rejection of His claims. He went to the Cross alright, but the Lost Tribes and Diaspora were still out there, so Jesus could not have been the Messiah.

This explains the disciples’ question in Acts 1:7. They were wondering about that issue. He told them to set that aside, that the real key to the birth of the Kingdom was the coming of the Holy Spirit, not a change of population, governments and geography. Keep in mind what Pentecost (Hebrew: Shavuot) celebrated: It’s the giving of the Covenant. But it’s also the timing of harvest, AKA “ingathering”. That was a symbol of bringing the Lost Tribes home. Pentecost was supposed to end the exile.

Jesus said that the coming of the Holy Spirit anointing was the real answer to that hope. That shoots big holes in a lot of so-called “prophecy teaching” in mainstream churches. In many ways, what Jesus said about the term “Great Tribulation” in Matthew 24 refers to something that already happened. In Luke’s version (Luke 21), he’s much more clear about this referring to the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Yet, it’s obvious Scripture sees things happening in cycles, patterns that repeat across time and space. Don’t forget “already-but-not-yet”.

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About the Scripture Itself

Posted on October 4, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 99: Debunking Greek NT Manuscript Conspiracies

The Bible is not God.

Would it shock you to imagine that God is able to work with His Elect even if all copies of the Bible ceased to exist on this earth? There was a time that happened in the history of Israel. During Manasseh’s reign, the existing text of the Old Testament up to that time had been completely lost. When his grandson Josaih took the throne, a copy of the Torah was discovered in the Temple, and they weren’t even sure it was real. It took a trusted prophet of God to confirm it was His Word.

Think about it: The Scripture was not the rule of faith for them. Rather, it was the Covenant. More to the point, it fell to a human anointed to speak for God under the Covenant. The net result was that it rested on the living relationship with God, a trust in His power to manifest Himself and guide His people. Today, it’s not just specially anointed individuals, but the entire Kingdom of God is made up of people able to hear from God directly in their hearts. This trumps any record of Scripture.

In the final analysis, you stand alone before God, accountable to Him personally. You can’t push it off onto Scripture any more than you could some other human you decide to follow as a spiritual leader. The life we live on this earth requires first and foremost that you stand before Christ all on your own. Yes, His Covenant demands that you come together into a household of faith with others and that you agree to follow some anointed leader in most things, but not so slavishly that you ignore your own convictions. Your ultimate voice of authority is in your convictions.

We use the Scripture as an indicator of how to think about the whole question of who Christ is and what it means to obey Him as Lord. Of course, we still have to delve into the Bible as a record of divine revelation up through the First Century. It’s quite a burden to unwind ourselves from where we are now in contrast to where people were in Jesus’ day. There’s a huge record of academic study on how the Hebrew people thought about reality. It’s not just the Bible itself, but a wealth of scholarship to understand what the Bible can tell us.

We’ve looked at the rich heritage of outside documents that indicate some of the background of Hebrew thought that wasn’t recorded in Scripture, but is indicated by what Scripture does say. And if that were not burden enough, we still have to wade through a vast collection of source material for the Scripture itself.

Today, there is a broad community of scholarship regarding just the text of Scripture itself. How should we approach the task of translating those source documents from, not just foreign languages, but foreign cultures? How do we capture what Scripture meant to the people who wrote it, and the people who were the initial audience for the writing, so that its impact is roughly equivalent to us today?

Herein lies the problem: The people doing the scholarship today are western people. They may well understand the Hebraic mystical mindset and how that mind communicates, but they must work alongside an academic establishment for which actual spiritual anointing is frankly potluck. Even Heiser has warned us that some people working professionally in Biblical Studies are hostile to genuine faith in Christ. They are allowed to work in that field because it’s all about the scholarship and intellectual pursuit, not about the faith that is supposed to be supported by that work.

This is part of the ongoing tension between Divinity versus Biblical Studies in Christian education. Biblical Studies is about the Bible itself, whereas Divinity seeks to apply the Bible, taking seriously what it demands of us. One has no faith while the other has no genuine grasp of the Bible. Thus, we end up with vast flocks of church folks whose shepherds don’t know the terrain nor understand the threats.

Heiser was trying, but he was still just a little too deeply wedded to the academic orientation. In the above linked podcast, he mocks the notion that Wescott and Hort were scoundrels. Let me unwind this. Wescott and Hort indicted themselves in their own private papers, fully admitting they committed fraud in their work, that it was slanted to spite the fans of the KJV. However, the whole field of Biblical Studies conceals a fair number of frauds and scoundrels because they have the intellect and certifications that give them a pass. That kind of discernment is verboten in Biblical Studies.

On the other hand, it’s true that 95% of the Scripture text is consistently the same across all the various document sources we have. Much of the remaining 5% is of no consequence. However, there are several passages in dispute that do make a substantial difference in doctrine. All the more so do they make a difference because many denominational disputes rest on quite a few passages that are frankly dubious. Those disputes are aggravated by the alienation between Divinity folks and Biblical Studies folks.

Most of the sheep have no clue what any of this is about. How many of you understand the debate between the Alexandrian versus Byzantine texts? Do you even know that those are? We have a system whereby this stuff becomes arcane because the folks who study these things have made it hard to grasp for those who don’t have the calling to specialize in such academic pursuits. Let me give you a hint: The rabbis certainly cared about texts and sources. The Apostles didn’t seem to care at all. We have no evidence that Jesus nor His followers paid much attention to the whole question.

Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, the Apostles used the Septuagint OT (often denoted by the Roman numeral “LXX” because the name “septuagint” means “seventy”, supposedly the number of scholars who were involved in making the translation). It is notably different from the commonly used source collections for translations of the OT into English, not just in a tiny few places. On top of that, the Apostles often “spiritualized” what they quoted from it in the first place. They took liberties in what to make of the wording of those quotes. Yes, I wrote a whole book on that issue, Gospel Red Herring: Spiritualizing the Text.

On top of all this, we get the distinct impression there was quite a bit of oral lore on Christ that never made it into Scripture, never mind Hebrew oral lore and non-canonical sources connected to understanding the Old Testament. Don’t even mention this to fundamentalist Protestants, because they are hostile to the whole idea that anything important can be found outside their “infallible” KJV Bibles.

For Radix Fidem in general, and Kiln of the Soul in particular, our standard is that we are accountable to the Bible. Pick your favorite but never be so foolish as to believe any English translation is any better than just okay. That’s in part because the sources they use are all tinged with a small degree of uncertainty. And it really doesn’t matter because the question is whether you are following your convictions first.

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Are You Deceived?

Posted on October 1, 2025 by ehurst

Can the Devil read your mind?

Scripture is loaded with references to God knowing our thoughts, both human thinking at large and in detail with you personally. You might wonder whether He has granted that power to any of His staff. Is it something in the nature of being elohim?

There is no clinical answer. Even saying God can read your mind is symbolic of something more substantial than mere data floating around in our heads. God knows our hearts, too. Perhaps a better image is that our bodies are broadcasting thoughts, feelings and commitments. If you believe any part of our teaching on the heart-led way of living, then you know there’s measurable scientific evidence for the emanations of our brains and hearts as a literal output of electromagnetic waves.

We know that God’s Creation around us can read our hearts because the energy field extends at least 15 feet. Researchers have detected an alteration of that energy field, a measurable reaction, when it encounters a living creature, even plants. Brain waves are far weaker, requiring very close proximity to measure anything. Would you expect that elohim could decode this output, too?

Yet we have a wealth of anecdotal evidence that our Enemy can be caught off-guard by some of our choices when we serve the Lord. Granted, this is only a perception, in that our Enemy is unable to hinder our pursuit of some choices. By the same token, we surely have experienced resistance and harassment that stings like fiery darts from the Enemy, very precisely targeted against our resolve to obey the Lord.

By the way, that term “Enemy” with a capital “E” is plural — “they, them” — referring to a whole class of beings. They all serve Satan in seeking to suck us into, and keep us in, God’s wrath. It’s like the royal “We” usage; it is Satan specifically, but also everyone who serves his agenda.

The image of temptation and interference is not one of stasis, as if it were a matter of regulatory policy from God. It’s not entirely a question of status. His law is more personal and has some flex. Don’t forget Job. We are the objects, not the subjects of the divine dispute. We are the pawns in a game that is far beyond our reckoning.

Thus, we return to the concept of covenant. We know that the Covenant hinders the Enemy from interfering in the Lord’s business with us. On the one hand, Daniel tells us that God’s decrees are a “public” matter that Satan can dispute and delay. The effects of that bickering outside of time and space can echo down to us for a substantial amount of time and space. But we also sense that there are some private communications between God and us that the Enemy cannot intercept.

Instead, they are left to discern it from what emanates from us and how we act. So it should be obvious that we would seek to stand in the place where God communicates with us personally, that we should seek access to His courts and His private counsel reserved for His own family. But the real issue is not so much what the Enemy can discern about God’s business, so much as what they can do about it. That inside track with God vests us with authority that they cannot touch.

Indeed, the whole point of the Covenant is that we drag our fleshly nature kicking and screaming into the counsel of the Lord. As we experience it, persistence over time improves everything we experience. A critical part of that process is both enslaving and killing the fleshly nature, something Scripture describes as incremental in nature. Like training any living thing, it requires our constant attention. Some fleshly natures are more intractable than others.

And some fleshly natures are more open to manipulation from Hell. But the greatest factor is how long and how thoroughly we may have coddled that fleshly nature over the years before we got serious about serving the Lord. The flesh gains strength and becomes a mighty ally of the Enemy against us. It becomes leverage for torment, the tension between what our hearts know is right and how compromised we are by a history of fleshly indulgence.

On the one hand, we know that we are tormented simply because we have a will to follow Christ. It would seem that people lacking that divine call would have fewer internal conflicts. Yet, Scripture makes it clear that those who belong to the Enemy are tormented in ways we can only imagine. The fleshly nature is vulnerable to the madness that separated us from God in the first place. The flesh is arrogant enough to insist that there is no trouble at all even when there is. We have an instinct to drive into the subconscious all sorts of things we cannot handle.

Thus, if you ever get the notion that sinners aren’t suffering, you are dead wrong. That’s a false accusation from the Devil, simply doing his job. The whole reason he is in that position is because he dared to suggest God wasn’t just when He sentenced the Devil to the Abyss for refusing to follow orders. God’s justice is the primary point of debate in Heaven. The mere lack of peace with God means that fallen men are denied something they desperately need. They will live their entire lives knowing on some level that they are missing something absolutely necessary for existence.

It won’t matter whether people allow that tension to rise to the conscious awareness. It’s there. We who have come to know His peace should sense that torment in some way. The Holy Spirit’s Presence includes a sense of empathy. It should be painful to watch people chasing any number of false promises in pursuit of that peace that only God can give.

Don’t sorrow merely for the pain they give you when they chase the lies; sorrow because they are tormented even worse than you. If you don’t long for them to come to peace for their own sakes, you are deeply deceived about your own salvation.

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House Churches

Posted on September 26, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 98: House Churches. In this episode, Heiser interviews a couple of men who have been involved in ministries and fellowships outside of the traditional institutional church atmosphere. This, of course, is something near and dear to my heart. This is another lesson that makes no direct reference to Bible passages, but you should recognize how this comes from the Word.

At times the interview banter was sharp and witty, but often loquacious. It didn’t need to take as long as it did, but that’s what happens when things proceed off the cuff as they do with interviews. Items that caught my attention…

We need not do anything that Jesus didn’t model in His ministry. If you pay attention, it was seldom “preaching” as we think of it. Far more time was invested in what we would call teaching. It’s not proclamation, but education. His most important work came after He alienated the freeloaders in the crowds who never understood His teaching in the first place.

His best work was in the small group setting. That’s where people really changed the most. He dealt with a lot of bored freeloaders, and His teaching got far more seriously once He managed to alienate them with His Bread of Life message. The crowds generally left Him and only those who really wanted His teaching stuck around.

The new term is “alternative church” if you need a name for it. These two guys generally avoid the issue of labeling their work. It’s just fellowship in private home settings, most often over food, along with Bible studies and prayer time. Sound familiar? That’s what we do together every chance we get.

Joke: After sampling the so-called “emergent church” these two guys decided the Lord was calling them to the “submergent church” to avoid drawing too much of the wrong kind of attention. They don’t view churches as public accommodation, but private family gatherings.

Question: What if “church” was not a time and place, but simply the people being what Christ made them to be? Nobody is waiting for some authority role or figure to give them permission and guidance. They simply began meeting privately over meals and not bothering with the formal structures. They didn’t “go” to church; they were the church. They grow strictly by word of mouth, no advertising, no website, etc.

The mix of people varies all over the map, from former staff of monster churches to people who had never been in a church. They learned early on to fold the Lord’s Supper into the meals they always shared when they gathered. Their meetings ranged between 40-70 people, typically in small groups scattered around the house, with no guidance what group you decided to join. At some point they are gathered for 30-45 minutes of teaching. This included references to the Second Temple literature, something few churches would ever touch.

Then they all pray and gather to eat. After the meal, a few musicians pick up a tune and they sing a few worship songs. They finish with testimonies of just a few minutes to encourage everyone in their faith. Naturally, people hang around afterward in unstructured fellowship.

There was a lot more to the interview, including how they do leadership. The leaders meet separately at least once every week, and it includes both paid leaders and volunteers. The outline indicates how easy it is to identify a calling for outreach to the community around them. These alternative churches each find something they do very well, maybe two or three things, and this becomes their signature.

Instead of trying to build little kingdoms, they help other people build their own alternative faith communities, their own “house churches” and the leadership will show up regularly to encourage those they are training. Aside from homes, they’ve helped to establish communities that met in a funeral parlor, a college dorm, offices, coffee shops, etc. Even homeless people got in on this, bringing whatever food they could afford just so they didn’t feel left out. The table is a great equalizer.

And this model works in China and similar restrictive environments.

The two mention The Didache (Lightfoot’s translation), an early catechism of the Apostles. They stressed that it wasn’t necessary to write new books about this; there is plenty of material out there quite adequate to the need. They noted also that the Day of Ascension was a very early celebration now totally lost in American awareness. It’s the image of having a King who is sitting in the Heavens that matters so much.

As for baptism, they’ve used every kind of water tank you can imagine. And this leads to another variation from the mainstream: Confession of your sins is actually workable in this alternative setting. It’s redemptive, healing, not punitive. People simply do this quite naturally once they get used to this different kind of faith community.

They go on to mention special outreach efforts such as campus ministries. They recommend you don’t rent equipment, just use whatever is available at the site you use. They say their biggest problem is lack of good teachers. They emphasize that you pray for like minded people, because they are always out there. God will bring them to you.

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OT Echoes in the Resurrection

Posted on September 20, 2025 by ehurst

Re: Naked Bible 95: David Burnett — Resurrection and the Death of the Gods – On the podcast, Heiser features a PhD student sharing a paper he was preparing for presentation at a scholarly conference. His thesis is that Paul’s discussion of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:35-50 is not based on Genesis 1-2, but on Deuteronomy 4.

Review: We know from Deuteronomy 32 that God parceled out the nations to His Elohim Council at the Tower of Babel. However, He separated out Abraham and his heirs (Israel) as His own nation. Deuteronomy 4 reminds Israel that they were not handed over to those other gods, so they must not worship them. The list of creatures Paul offers in 1 Corinthians 15 is an echo of the same list in Deuteronomy 4, not the list we see in Genesis 1-2.

Side note: The language of “sun, moon and stars” in Deuteronomy 4 refers to idolatry, as the pagans regarded those celestial bodies as deities. It’s not that Israel believed so much in astrology, but knew the pagans regarded them as gods with great power over human existence.

The Second Temple Jewish scholars regarded Deuteronomy 4 an evangelistic passage. It was the basis for calling out to Gentiles to stop worshiping God’s lackeys and to focus on Him as the Maker of all things. Paul knew he was not under the power of those pagan deities. The author cites Philo as a primary example of this thinking and did not argue at all whether such deities existed, only that they were secondary powers, at best.

Nobody doubted that humans could not handle this world without some kind of divine guidance, so it was all proper. We cannot stand on our own; that is a very recent myth. Greek mythology insisted that we must be herded by a higher race of beings (outlined in Plato’s Laws). The point is that the whole of humanity is incapable of deciding anything really important but are steered by higher powers. Philo noticed that this notion was wholly consistent with Scripture. His point was that Israel was not allotted to those beings but selected by God.

Earlier in that same letter to Corinth (10:20-21) Paul warns them to avoid participating in ritual pagan feasts. Even though the idols were actually of no significance, Christians were not under the authority of those demons and elohim (see Deuteronomy 32:17 and 1 Corinthians 12:2).

Then this author lowers the boom: You are no longer part of the nations. Your national identity was tied up in idolatry and control from hostile powers. You must leave all that behind; you must denounce your human national identity. You are now under a Covenant with Heaven; you have been selected and pulled out of that. They didn’t become Jews because that was just another ethne (human national identity). It’s a wholly different category based on spirit, not DNA and culture. This is the New Exodus.

It’s the same language used in the Call of Abraham as well as the Exodus. Abraham was taken away from the elohim and demons who ruled the pagan nations. Israel was not one of the 70, not in the Table of Nations. And who inherits the Call of Abraham? That’s what Galatians is all about. It’s the same language for Christians.

It also connects to the imagery of how every royal heir in the ANE was commissioned to go off and do battle, to defeat some enemy who held people who didn’t belong to them. God did battle with the gods of Egypt and defeated them. The Ten Plagues were a judgment on those gods. The language of resurrection comes from the image of Israel being dead under the power of Pharaoh. God brought Israel back to life.

The author with Heiser refers to the chaos Isaiah describes in chapters 24-27, and how God restores cosmic order. Isaiah clearly foreshadows a latter-day exodus of people who won’t need a verbal law but will obey from a new spirit. Instead of extravagant imagery of kings as gods, the New Israel will have God as their real king.

It sweeps in the imagery of Israel’s elders beholding God on the mountain (70 of them, the same number of Jehovah’s elohim elders who beheld His glory). The numerical parallels show up across the ANE pagan mythology, of ascending to a cosmic mountain image to celebrate the glory of one god or another. Isaiah promises the final gathering and celebratory feast. This is the Wedding of the Lamb, the son as conquering hero. The elders will assemble for inspection and be judged (Psalm 82).

This is all in the background, the context of what Paul relates in the key passage in 1 Corinthians about resurrection. Every time Paul uses the language of “Holy Ones” — often lamely translated as “saints” — he’s pointing to the Day of Judgment when the Elect will replace the Elohim Council.

The podcast goes on to dig into the terminology of the Unseen Realm and how it completely alters how we see the New Testament. The New echoes the Old in a thousand ways.

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