Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 816 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Walk Like an Israelite - Wisdom Wednesday


Thank you for joining us for our five days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. Today is Day 816 of our Trek, and it is Wisdom Wednesday.  The past several weeks on Wednesday we have been focusing on interpreting current events through a Biblical Worldview.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is important that you also have a proper understanding of God’s Word.  Especially in our western cultures, we do not fully understand the Scriptures from the mindset and culture of the authors.  In order help us all have a better understanding of Gods Word I would like to invest the next several weeks reviewing a series of essays from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars Dr. Micheal S. Heiser which he has compiled into a book titled  ’I Dare You Not to Bore Me With the Bible.’

 

We are broadcasting from our studio at ‘The Big House’ in Marietta, OH.   If you ever invest much time around teenagers, and even adults for that matter, you will soon realize that within a certain group they will start acting very similar.  Dressing the same, walking the same, using the same vernacular, and even taking on many of the same practices and traditions.   It was not any different when God called Abraham as a chosen person to start a new nation.  Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and indeed the entire nation of Israel had many of the same practices, habits, and traditions of the surrounding nations and people groups.  We in our western culture and society through the millennium have morphed into a much different mindset and practices.   Because of this, and the practices we have adopted it is difficult to take on the mindset of the ancient Israelites and the surrounding nations.

So our essay for today is titled:
Walk Like an Israelite
Dr. Heiser explains his mindset change came during graduate schools when he took a course the Ugaritic language which came from the Persian area and dates back prior to the calling of Abraham.  Heiser puts it this way.  Cuneiform tablets changed my life. I’m not kidding. As I look back on my 15 years of graduate school in biblical studies, the turning point in how I view the Bible was my course in Ugaritic, a cuneiform language very similar to biblical Hebrew. This class compelled me to transform how to “read the Bible in context” from a naive platitude to an issue of spiritual integrity.
·       A Bible Study Epiphany
Most of us have had the impression that interpreting the Bible in context meant learning about a piece of pottery here, an odd custom there, or having a factual acquaintance with who was alive, and what those people were doing at the time of the biblical events.

Through his study in his Ugaritic course, Heiser learned that all of that can divorce the Bible from the ancient world in one critical way: It can exclude religious or theological ideas from all the “context talk.”  It’s easy to presume that most of the Bible’s theological content was unique to Israel. We usually think that Israel shared some cultural customs with pagan Gentiles—like diet, dress, marriage, and family structure. When we come to think about Israel's religious worldview, we think it was uniquely handed down from heaven, having no common links with paganism. Not true – the similarities in the Ugaritic tables is striking.For starters, the people of Ugarit, which was a city-state in ancient Syria, described their gods with words and phrases that were in the Old Testament—in a number of cases word for word. Their chief deity shared the same name (El) as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. An important difference is the El of Ugarit could hardly be called holy by biblical standards.