I'd like to draw your attention again to the nature of Abraham's dealings with the sons of Heth in the 23rd chapter of Genesis. Abraham wanted to buy the land and not receive it as a gift, since a gift can be taken back. But also notice what they say to him: "You are a mighty prince among us; bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places." Abraham, as we can witness in the 14th chapter of Genesis, is a mighty prince, a warrior, a man known for getting and keeping what's due him. He goes to war against 4 victorious kings who have abducted his nephew and his nephew's family and gets them and their goods back. When the king of Sodom offers him a reward, Abram replies:
Now the king of Sodom said to Abram, "Give me the persons, and take the goods for yourself." But Abram said to the king of Sodom, "I have lifted my hand to the LORD, God Most High, the Possessor of heaven and earth, that I will take nothing, from a thread to a sandal strap, and that I will not take anything that is yours, lest you should say, `I have made Abram rich'--except only what the young men have eaten, and the portion of the men who went with me: Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre; let them take their portion.
The point here is that the men who deal with Abraham have no idea what he's talking about. What kind of a mighty prince refuses tribute? A powerful man is worthy of whatever he can extort out of those less powerful.
Clearly there is a separation between Abraham and the people of the land- a distinct and voluntary separation which his descendants inherited from him. The distinction of being the Chosen People. But Chosen for what? Let's keep that question in mind, as well as the notion of the importance of symbols and their meanings, as we continue our investigation.
Obviously, we can't go through every theme of the Bible, so we'll be concentrating on certain threads as they weave through that tapestry, seeing where they go and what messages they spell out, and whether they tie in with our thesis of Jeremiah's Wheelbarrow. Not that Jeremiah had a wheelbarrow, but that if we look for hidden treasure, we miss the medium as the message.
So, as the LORD said to Abraham, his people would be strangers in a land not theirs (which would be the Egyptian captivity), to be afflicted four hundred years. Why the delay? Because the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet complete. Moses warned the people, however, in Deuteronomy 9:1-5 Deuteronomy 9:1-5
"Hear, O Israel: You are to cross over the Jordan today, and go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourself, cities great and fortified up to heaven, a people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you heard it said, `Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?' Therefore understand today that the LORD your God is He who goes over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and bring them down before you; so you shall drive them out and destroy them quickly, as the LORD has said to you. Do not think in your heart, after the LORD your God has cast them out before you, saying, `Because of my righteousness the LORD has brought me in to possess this land'; but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is driving them out from before you. It is not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart that you go in to possess their land, but because of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD your God drives them out from before you, and that He may fulfill the word which the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."
not to assume that they were taking over the Promised Land for any righteous qualities which they themselves possessed. "Because of the wickedness of those nations" is why they went in to possess the land. Why, then, did Israel as a nation not last? In Exodus 34:10-16Exodus 34:10-16
And He said [to Moses, before the wandering in the wilderness]: "Behold, I make a covenant. Before all your people I will do marvels such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in any nation; and all the people among whom you are shall see the work of the LORDLORD. For it is an awesome thing that I will do with you. Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I am driving out from before you the Amorite and the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Perizzite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land where you are going, lest it be a snare in your midst. But you shall destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images (for you shall worship no other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they play the harlot with their gods and make sacrifice to their gods, and one of them invites you and you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of his daughters for your sons, and his daughters play the harlot with their gods and make your sons play the harlot with their gods."
, God tells Moses that the Israelites must avoid worshipping the local gods. And this, we read in subsequent books, is precisely what happened. In Deuteronomy 31:14-18Deuteronomy 31:14-18
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Behold, the days approach when you must die; call Joshua, and present yourselves in the tabernacle of meeting, that I may inaugurate him." So Moses and Joshua went and presented themselves in the tabernacle of meeting. Now the LORD appeared at the tabernacle in a pillar of cloud, and the pillar of cloud stood above the door of the tabernacle. And the LORD said to Moses, "Behold, you will rest with your fathers; and this people will rise and play the harlot with the gods of the foreigners of the land, where they go to be among them, and they will forsake Me and break My covenant which I have made with them. Then My anger shall be aroused against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide My face from them, and they shall be devoured. And many evils and troubles shall befall them, so that they will say in that day, `Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?' And I will surely hide My face in that day because of all the evil which they have done, in that they have turned to other gods ."
, God tells Moses that the people will, indeed, worship the local idols, and that He would forsake them because of it.
The study of history is as difficult and controversial as any subject. How we gauge the validity of sources is a value judgment. The reason I bring this up is because I want to differentiate myself from two schools of thought. The first is that fundamentalist viewpoint which takes the Bible at its most literal possible meaning. They deny the overwhelming evidence of evolution because they believe that the Book of Genesis should have described it if it were true, that God should have made the Bible a biology primer, describing the evolution of fish, amphibians and dinosaurs to farmers and shepherds. Therefore these fundamentalists take away from the Bible its purpose as a book of worship, and a book of individual men and their relationship to God. And they set science at odds with Christ, education at odds with religion, and make anyone who believes in the Bible seem to be a yokel who can't accept modern times.
Adherents of the second school of thought have the opposite problem: if there is a hint of prophecy in a book of the Bible, they automatically date it after the fact. Therefore they place the authorship of Daniel after the time of Alexander the Great, because his visions contain descriptions of the ascendancy of Greece. This same thinking declares a second Isaiah. And Jeremiah, of course, could not have foreseen the return of the Israelites from Babylon, and therefore would not have hidden things for their return.(From The New Unger's Bible Handbook, by Merrill F. Unger, revised by Gary N. Larson, Moody Press, Chgo, 1984, p 293)
Authenticity of the book [of Daniel]. From the days of Porphyry, a neo-Platonic philosopher of the 3rd cen. A.D. to the present, the authenticity of the book of Daniel has been denied. Many have made it a pious forgery of the Maccabean era (167 B.C.). Two principle reasons exist why Danielic authorship is denied: (1) the minutely accurate picture of the Seleucid-Ptolemaic wars and the career of Antiochus Epiphanes (ch. 11), which are unthinkable as genuine prophecies to the rationalistic critic; and (2) alleged historical inaccuracies in the book. The first objection rests on a denial of divine revelation, and the second rests on arguments from silence, plausible but erroneous presuppositions, insufficient data of untenable interpretations. Many alleged difficulties have been cleared up by archaeological and historical advance, but the book seems designed as a battleground between faith and unbelief.
By post-dating the book of Daniel, a scholar will also (please note this because it's very important) post-date anything seemingly related to Daniel, including philology (word-origins). In other words, by saying the book of Daniel was written in the 2nd instead of the 6th century B.C., one will also date the style of letters to the 2nd century, and anything seemingly contemporary with the style of writing or the letters or the particular use of allegories or any writing mentioning the book of Daniel will also be placed in the 2nd century instead of the 6th, and anyone adhering to this dating method will write his or her historical interpretation based on it. In even other words- if I write and say the book of Daniel was an obvious influence on another work written in the year 450 B.C., the historian adhering to this other dating method will regard me as "pious" or "religious" and therefore "naive" or "unsophisticated," and correct my dates to the 2nd century where they belong. I hope that's clear, because it is a big reason why scroll scholars do not consider the possibility of the treasure of the copper scroll belonging to the First Temple.
This is also relevant because of the book of Isaiah. The scroll of Isaiah found at Qumran is a copy of the entire Hebrew text of Isaiah, including what we read in our Bibles as chapters 40-66. These chapters are sometimes considered, by Bible scholars, the writing of a "Second Isaiah," because they contain prophecies of events after Isaiah's time, and, paralleling the above discussion of Daniel, it is considered irrationalistic to date these chapters from 750-680 B.C., the traditional dates of Isaiah's ministry. The reason it is important for us to note this is that the existence of the scroll of Isaiah at Qumran, and any similarities in printing style between it and the copper scroll, may be used to date the copper scroll after the second temple. Isaiah's ministry, it should be noted, predates Jeremiah's.