Catacomb Resident Blog

Stop at the Boundary

01 November 2023

I've been asked about this.

In Matthew 11, Jesus lowers the boom on Judaism. First, He condemns the kind of unbelief that led to so very few repenting at the preaching of His cousin, John the Baptist. He elevates John to his proper standing in God's reckoning, because John clearly understood God's heart and Word. By contrast, Jesus condemns a handful of cities where the Jewish leadership had so completely warped the people's knowledge of God that they could not recognize the Father's compassion in the miracles.

Nearer His crucifixion, Jesus condemned Jerusalem as a symbol for the whole Jewish nation. The Old Testament prophets had already warned how easy it was for the Hebrew people to be led astray. The leadership had taken advantage of this and preyed upon their own by weakening their faith and communion with Jehovah. God chose the most difficult nation on earth because that was the best way to demonstrate His glory and compassion for the rest of the human race. If He kept doing for them when they refused to be faithful, just think how sweet it is to serve Him without the hindrance of a Hebrew spiteful character.

It is important to see the broad sweep of how things got to the place where Jesus condemned His nation so harshly. At the very birth of their national identity at Mount Sinai, they were already hard-hearted about demanding their own petty comfort. It seemed Moses and his assistants were quite alone at times in being focused on the Lord and His majesty.

That generation died in the wilderness, and a new generation rose up to conquer the Promised Land. While their faith failed often enough, we justly see the pinnacle of Hebrew spiritual power in the time of David. While Solomon did elevate Hebrew wisdom to it's peak, he also opened the door to a very long decline in faith, relying on the very marvelous human wisdom God gave him instead of the God who gave it.

And by "faith" I naturally mean feudal submission to Jehovah. That was the major point of all the prophecies leading up to the Siege of Jerusalem. The Hebrews were spiritually adulterous, and so were carried off to Assyria and Babylon. Yes, the Judeans did get that lesson while in Babylonian Exile, but in another sense, they lost everything else. They became ritually faithful without any real bonding. It was empty faithfulness, and we can see it in the prophecy of Malachi, warning the people that their hearts were not in it. They feared God, but didn't actually respect Him. They still treated Him as something far less than God, as a very powerful lord, but not family.

This is the root of moral and spiritual failure in the Second Temple Period. Alexander the Great did bring his Hellenism that destroyed the Hebrew mystical approach, but it was a final blow, not the actual cause. The people were already somewhat legalistic returning from Exile. It was very hard to instill a true bond of commitment from the heart in the Judeans. Their long encounter with first the Babylonian and then Persian cultures was a one-two punch that set them up for spiritual collapse.

So, when Jesus comes on the scene, the leadership and society of Judaism didn't know God at all. The whole of Second Temple Jewish literature betrays this fatal flaw. Anything published during that time was rotten with a vacuous lack of acquaintance with the character and personality of Jehovah. Instead, it was loaded with efforts to pin things down from a human level. They loaded up on empty piety and typically gilded the lily in trying to prove something without ever once appealing to faith itself.

This is what we see in the Books of Enoch, too. This is why I do not share Dr. Heiser's enthusiasm for 1 Enoch. It's one thing to have a long legacy of oral lore about Enoch, the man of extraordinary faith. It's another thing altogether to portray him as a fool who could be persuaded to intercede for the elohim after their gross violation of God's boundaries for them. I don't deny that the New Testament writers referred to some things as recorded in 1 Enoch, but what Heiser ignores is that they don't quote the text, but refer to events everyone knew about, which events were also discussed in 1 Enoch. However, the text of 1 Enoch includes a bunch of crap that is blatantly at odds with the more ancient Hebrew culture.

Again: 1 Enoch was not the source for the New Testament mentions of Enoch. Rather, that book was a fanciful record that drew from the same oral lore used by the New Testament writers. That there was an oral lore has long been established. Heiser is overly excited about proving something on a human scholarly level and goes too far in citing scholarship from people who did not even know Jehovah and didn't recognize Jesus when He came as their Messiah. The people who wrote 1 Enoch were the people who nailed Jesus to the Cross.

He also cites modern scholars who didn't appear to know Jesus. I'm not going to write several books about this and throw a ton of obscure footnotes that you might not understand. Most of what I wrote above can be gleaned from Scripture itself, along with just a bare outline of historical knowledge of the Ancient Near East. There's a very good reason 1 Enoch didn't make it into the canon of Scripture. Mostly is the fact it is not an effort to reveal our Father, but a fanciful report of things from a human viewpoint pointing to a human understanding of things.

On a related note: The New Testament Hebrew disciples chose to use the Greek word translated "angels" for a whole broad category of non-human beings. The word is not confined to mere messengers of Jehovah. From what we can discern in Scripture itself, there were multiple levels of these creatures with different names (functional labels) that reflect just how impossible it is for humans to comprehend the whole picture.

Do recall the beings who stood around Ezekiel's "gyroscope"? The "elders" and the flying creatures around God's throne in Revelation? How about the Seraphim and Cherubim? We've already discussed at length the elhoim of the divine council. It's the same as the word translated "demon" -- it's intentionally ambiguous. It's not a delineation, but an indication of something unknowable.

Christ met with His disciples after His resurrection. He walked around in a solid physical form, but it was clearly not a body bound by space and time, as our flesh is. It is about the only hint we have of eternal bodies. The various apparitions that show up as "angels" in Scripture are equally thin in details. There is precious little we can say about that eternal form, and what variations there might be for different classes of being.

So, we have no idea what shape the elohim can assume, never mind the other classes of beings portrayed in places like John's Revelation, Ezekiel's visions, etc. It's not wrong to speculate, but it's wrong to make your personal speculation someone else's law, or to lock things in and run roughshod over evidence that doesn't support your speculation. We have one final clue from Jesus that eternal bodies do not reproduce because they do not die. You've all ready it, I hope: Matthew 22:30 and Mark 12:25, with a similar comment in Luke 20:35-36. It is irresponsible to assume that doesn't mean anything, just as irresponsible to assume you already know what had to happen with the elohim who married human females in Genesis.

Where Scripture is silent, we must not assert things it does not say. This is the whole reason I reject theology as the path to establishing religious boundaries. Theology is nothing more than human reasoning, trying to nail things down not clearly stated in the Word. One theology is as good as another. The Radix Fidem way is to expect theology to happen, but not to rely on it for anything more than markers of cooperation and fellowship.

We have all we can do digging into Hebrew thinking behind Hebrew Scripture so we can tease out the meaning of what they wrote. I refuse to even discuss something like "propositional truth" for the simple reason the ancient Hebrew scholars would reject it. This much is readily apparent. They were eastern mystics and as was Jesus Himself. The Bible is an eastern mystical book. Figuring out how to work with that is burden enough without trying to construct elaborate matrices of theology to bind people's thinking on a human level. Biblical doctrine is hard enough; stop at that boundary.

Heiser invokes the question of why the world is so awful. He emphasizes the typical answer of Judaism, blaming the interference of the erring elohim, and de-emphasizing the Fall. This is frankly heretical. The Second Temple Jews did ignore the Fall because they had left behind their ancient Hebrew outlook. The New Testament is rather Hebraic in emphasizing the Fall, making scant mention of any elohim interference. Judaism is not ancient Hebrew religion; the Second Temple Period was Jewish, not Hebraic.

Dr. Heiser leaves the New Testament doctrinal boundaries on this issue. He has given us a lot of good scholarship about Old Testament Scripture, but then too quickly goes too far on many peripheral issues.


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