Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1236 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Mastering the Bible - Inspiration Through Editing - Worldview Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.  Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1236 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday.  Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God and His Word.  Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday will be Mastering the Bible through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better.  When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.
Mastering The Bible – Inspiration Through Editing
Insight Five: Editing Was Part of the Process of Biblical Inspiration
If you’re like most people in the developed world (so it seems), you talk about yourself and your family using social media. If you’re the exception rather than the rule, social media is still understandable by analogy, it’s like a personal diary of what you, your friends, and your family encounter and do every day.

We know how something like that is supposed to read. It would be written in the first person: I did this, then we did that. How odd would it sound if you were reading a friend’s Facebook page, and they talked about themselves using the third person? Instead of what you'd expect your friend to post (“I went to a movie last night”), your friend talked about herself as though she were someone else (“She went to a movie last night”). When someone writes about themselves you expect the first person, not the third. It’s because of that expectation that scholars can tell biblical books were edited.

One of the best examples of this is the book of Ezekiel 1:1-4:

On July 31 of my thirtieth year, while I was with the Judean exiles beside the Kebar River in Babylon, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. This happened during the fifth year of King Jehoiachin’s captivity.  (The Lord gave this message to Ezekiel son of Buzi, a priest, beside the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians, and he felt the hand of the Lord take hold of him.)

 As I looked, I saw a great storm coming from the north, driving before it a huge cloud that flashed with lightning and shone with brilliant light. There was fire inside the cloud, and in the middle of the fire glowed something like gleaming amber.The first verse uses the first person. I underlined the two examples in today’s journal. The beginning creates the expectation that Ezekiel is writing about himself. But in verse three there is a switch to the third person (underlined). Now the writer is clearly not Ezekiel, but is an anonymous author referring to Ezekiel in the third person. Verse four switches back to first person.

These switches are the telltale signs of an editor. The book of Ezekiel has many such instances, as do many other biblical books. That we don’t know the identity of these editors is of little consequence, since the authors of many books in the Bible (particularly the Old Testament) are unknown.