Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening and welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. And welcome to our first anniversary episode! It’s been a whole year. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and if you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Bobby will be taking your calls tonight, which we will get to in the second part of today’s show.

So before I get to my intro, Fr. Stephen and I wanted to take a moment to mention why our regular engineer, Matushka Trudi, is not with us tonight. This past Sunday, her husband, Fr. Anastasy Richter, known familiarly as Fr. Stacey, as he was preparing to serve the Divine Liturgy, collapsed in the altar at St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church in Chesterton, Indiana, where he was the pastor. He was rushed to the hospital but soon pronounced dead. He was just 52 years old and leaves behind not only Matushka Trudi but their three daughters, as well as a shocked and grieving parish. If you would like to help the family in this time of sudden grief, a GoFundMe page has been set up for you to make donations. Now, we’ve shared the link on our Facebook page, but you can also go to the GoFundMe website and do a site on “Richter”; that’s spelled R-i-c-h-t-e-r, and you should see the fundraiser come up. Whatever else you can do, please say a prayer for the resting of his soul and also for the comfort of his family, his friends, and his parish. Thanks, everyone.

So we’ve been on the air for a full year now, and for this episode we are going to be talking about the great biblical patriarch, Abraham. And, as we love to do on Lord of Spirits, we are heading deep into the ancient world, to more than 2,000 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, for Abraham lived about as distant from that event as we ourselves do. Now usually when people think of the ancient world, they might picture a time of primitives: you know, people living in caves, tribes of hunter-gatherers lucky to get a spark of fire from banging two sticks together and rocks, that kind of thing. But is that the kind of world that Abraham lived in, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen De Young: No.

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, in Star Trek: Picard, season two, they’re traveling back to the 21st century, AD. We’re going back to the 21st century, BC. So that means we’re better, and you can stream this for free. [Laughter] So you can’t beat that. Yeah, so it’s actually quite the opposite of that. We tend to not realize just how organized and efficient and interconnected the ancient world was. Back in the “Giants” episode we talked about the Bronze Age collapse. This is—we’re now going even further back than that, but already civilization is a thing that exists. The period that Abram or Abraham lived in is referred to as the Ur III period, sometimes also called the Sumerian Renaissance.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which makes me kind of wonder: Where is the Sumerian Ren Faire? Like, why is there not a renaissance faire for Sumerians?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, there’s not a Sumerian word for “huzzah,” I think is the issue.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] How do you know it’s not a Sumerian word?

Fr. Stephen: Not one that we’ve discovered. So this period ran from circa 2112 to about 2004 BC, so this really is sort of as far back before Christ as we are after Christ. 2100 BC versus 2100 AD. And to sort of explain what the Ur III period is about—and this is kind of still going to be weird and confusing even after we kind of explain what it’s about—

Fr. Andrew: But that’s what we do on this podcast, right?

Fr. Stephen: Sort of some basics of ancient Mesopotamian politics. This is why you come here. [Laughter] The region of Mesopotamia, which is Greek for “between the rivers,” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, as they flow down into the Persian Gulf—there were two main regions: Sumer, which was the southern region, really southeastern, near where the rivers meet the Persian Gulf; and then the northern region, which is really sort of northwest, which is Akkad (A-k-k-a-d, for people keeping track). And so these two regions contain some of the earliest city-states in the world. These individual city-states were ruled over by kings who were seen to be gods, so sort of god-kings, who were also the priests of the deity of that city, who was worshiped generally in a central ziggurat in the center of the city. We’ve talked about ziggurats before. And then what happens is, politically, various cities in those two regions, in either region, would become sort of politically ascendant at particular times.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and if folks are interested in kind of the big, grand sweep of the civilization of this era, we both recommend actually a podcast that we are both fans of, which is the Fall of Civilizations podcast. They did an episode on the Sumerian Empire, which—I don’t know; it’s, like, three or four hours long, which really gives us something to reach for… [Laughter] But it’s really… I mean, it’s just a really, really well done podcast. I mean, it’s not a Christian podcast; it’s just a history podcast, but, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it’s available both in the original audio podcast and there’s also a YouTube version that has some incredibly stunning HD video and photos, like, on location in Iraq so you can see some of these things. So, either way, that is worth consuming if you want to spend four hours learning about the whole sweep of the history of Sumer.

Fr. Andrew: And, let’s face it, people listening to this podcast, there’s probably at least a good 50/50 chance that they are interested in that.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, yes, so that’s a place where you can go get all that, because we’re just going to be talking about this little sliver here of this one period. Through the skill and force of charisma, etc., of a given one of these kings at any given point, his city would sort of become ascendant and be able to project its will over the other nearby city-states of the region and sort of…

Fr. Andrew: Make them vassals.

Fr. Stephen: Right, make them function as vassals to him. The Ur III period is called the Ur III period because we used to think that it was the third time that Ur had become this sort of ascendant quasi-capital city. Now, it turns out, upon further archaeological research, that this was only the second time. There was no Ur II period. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s one and then there’s three…

Fr. Stephen: But they didn’t change the name, because changing it from Ur III to Ur II, I guess, would have been too confusing, like having someone on the faculty not named Bruce. [Laughter] So they just left it as Ur III, even though there’s no two; it goes from one to three. So there were actually only these two periods where Ur was ascendant, but what tended to happen was not that— And generally it would be a city in Sumer or a city in Akkad, and culturally, whichever region had the ascendant city would also become sort of culturally ascendant, because Akkad was populated by Semitic peoples with a Semitic languages; Akkadian is… sort of relates to other Semitic languages, sort of the way Sanskrit relates to other Indo-European languages.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so, you know, for those of you who don’t know, that would be stuff like Hebrew and Arabic…

Fr. Stephen: Aramaic, Syriac, Ugaritic.

Fr. Andrew: Right, whereas Sumerian is this language isolate, meaning that it’s not related, as far as we know, to anything else. And yet, these two language groups and cultural groups existed right next to each other, and borrowed each other’s words occasionally, actually. So that’s fun, too.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we’re also not sure, ethnically, what the Sumerians were. [Laughter] They’re kind of this quasi-mysterious group, but they were not aliens, I assure you.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not ancient aliens, everybody.

Fr. Stephen: Not at all! They were not aliens. But so, rather than one of the other cities sort of rising up in a revolution against the currently dominant city, what tended to happen was that sort of the quasi-imperial reign of one of these cities would fall to a foreign invasion. There were a number of nomadic peoples, both east and west of Sumer and Akkad of Mesopotamia, and you have these city-states which were gathering wealth from the whole known world at the time in one place, and so those city-states would start to make tempting targets for those nomadic invaders to come and pillage. Generally, when they came and pillaged, they would kind of take control of the area, but it usually wouldn’t last long because they weren’t skilled bureaucrats, administrators. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s one thing to take over a city; it’s another thing to try to run it. So usually they would just sort of occupy it, take the stuff, and then leave, and then the locals would have to try to rebuild. And then meanwhile, some other city in the area would become the city.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and sometimes it would be one of the kings of one of the other city-states would sort of drive them out, and then, by virtue of being the hero who got rid of the foreign invaders, their city would end up becoming the next ascendant city. And that’s what we’re going to see happen in the Ur III period, because, previous to the Ur III period, there was an Akkadian dynasty, and this is the dynasty that was started by Sargon of Akkad.

Fr. Andrew: Who was an actual person.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, not the quasi-political YouTuber, but the actual guy whom he named himself after. And that dynasty collapsed through an invasion by the Gutians who came down from the Zagros Mountains and invaded and managed to basically destroy the supporting infrastructure that allowed the city of Akkad to keep the others as vassals. You have this interconnected chain of tribute being paid and taxes and that kind of thing, and they disrupted all that. So they only occupied the area, though, for about 20-25 years, and then a good fellow named Utu-hengal—we just don’t have good names any more; Sumerian names, so cool… Utu-hengal defeated the Gutian king at the time, whose name was Tirigan, and that then led to Ur-Nammu, who was the king of Ur, coming to ascendancy and beginning the third dynasty of Ur, which was actually the second dynasty of Ur. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Ur-Nammu figures big in the story that is told on that episode of Fall of Civilizations podcast.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And Ur-Nammu… Part of the reason this is called the Sumerian Renaissance is he was actually apparently a particularly gifted leader, at least materially. So he issues a law code that was very similar to the one that you’re probably more familiar with that Hammurabi issued. Hammurabi is about 500 years later.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s worth probably taking a moment that law codes at this point, 4,000 years ago, were not like the law codes that we have now. Like, the whole theory was different. It was not: “Okay, we’re going to establish laws and everyone has to sort of obey them, and the king’s job is to enforce these laws.” No, it was: “This is the stuff the king expects of everybody.” The law was simply just his will on paper—well, clay tablets, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: Clay tablets usually, yes.

Fr. Andrew: Tablets…

Fr. Stephen: Stone obelisks in a similar town.

Fr. Andrew: They’re more like house rules, just like parents set house rules. If you have kids, you’ve probably had kids attempt to enforce the rules against the parents. Like, no, no, no, no, that’s not how the rules work, son. [Laughter] These rules are an extension of my and your mother’s will. And that’s how laws worked in the ancient world. This is what the king expected, and he could change it at any time. Now, if he was a smart king, he wouldn’t constantly change it, but the king is the king and that’s the way that it is. He’s not above the law; the law is part of him, essentially.

Fr. Stephen: He is the law, like Judge Dredd.

Fr. Andrew: Just like Judge Dredd. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But yeah, and this is important because it affects how we see Old Testament law, too, that we get into discussions of it and we tend to treat it like a law code, like a system of law or a rule of law. There are people who try to pull civil law out the Old Testament law, but it was the same type of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Political theory.

Fr. Stephen: This is the king—in the case of Old Testament law, Yahweh, the God of Israel—the king says, “This is what I expect of you as my vassals and my subjects, and this is what I’m going to do to you if I don’t get what I expect from you, and this is what I’m going to do for you if I do: if you’re loyal and true and faithful, this is what I will do for you.” And that’s sort of the covenant structure. The covenant structure that’s used in the Old Testament is not just an Old Testament thing; this is a pattern that is followed by… In fact, the book of Deuteronomy follows very closely a particular form of Hittite… the Suzerain Vassal Treaty. But this is the same kind of thing. When we talk about Ur-Nammu’s law code, it’s him saying, “Here’s what I expect from all of you, and here’s what’s going to happen if I don’t get it, but then here also are the positive things that I’m promising you,” that he would help aid with their protection from invasion, and he would sort of share the wealth, that he would help with cultivation and expansion of lands.

Fr. Andrew: Because that’s what a smart king does.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, and in terms of expansion, over the Ur III period, the domain controlled from Sumer expanded to stretch from the southeastern part of what’s now Turkey—Anatolia, or Asia Minor—all the way to Iran. And not only did they control territory over into what’s now Iran, but they conducted trade; they established trade routes with the civilizations in the Indus River Valley at this time.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, so this is basically parts of modern Turkey, Iraq, Iran, kind of that whole area.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And then they were able to set up these sort of stable trade routes to bring things over land all the way from India, from what’s now India. And he divided the regions around each city-state into sort of imperial provinces, the domains of the individual kings.

Fr. Andrew: Right! And, I mean, this is interesting, because it’s a kind of federalism of sorts, or, I mean, maybe not federalism, but you’re starting to see complexity of structure, the likes of which we usually associate in the ancient world only with Rome. I mean, that’s centuries upon centuries later. You already have this regional subsidiarity, a real empire, that’s held together with bureaucracy. It’s complex; it’s organized. There’s a whole system of economy, tribute and taxation. And all the marks of a great civilization. So you’ve got literature; this includes stuff like the Epic of Gilgamesh, which a lot of people interested in the ancient world would know about, which includes a flood story, because of course all ancient mythologies include flood story. As we’ve mentioned before on this show, the Sumerian Kings List, which mentions that Gilgamesh is a giant. Yeah, so I mean it’s big!

I actually looked this up. The population of the Sumerian Empire at its height had about 1.5 million people in it, but the whole world’s population at the time was about 27 million. So that means that roughly one out of 18 people in the world lived in the Sumerian Empire. It was gigantic for that time. It was big. And all of this is to say that—again, these are not tribes living in caves. These are cities and city-states and sort of governorates, all functioning together in this vast web.

And this is the world that Abraham lives in.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is the period that he lives in. So he lived, came of age… I mean, when his story really begins, he’s 75 years old. So this is the civilization he lived in for 75 years. This is his time and his era, sort of before we actually meet him in Genesis. So then the Ur III period sort of comes to an end by another foreign invasion. The Elamites come and invade. They sort of sow chaos, manage to occupy parts of Sumer for 20-odd years again. And then the Martu people, whom you may remember from the “Giants” episode… “Martu” means “Westerner,” basically. They come from Syria, essentially, and invade. These are the biblical Amorites.

Fr. Andrew: Right. People get excited when we talk about Amorites!

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and out of the Martu coming in and taking over ultimately will come the establishment of the original Babylonian Empire, the original Babylonian dynasty, from which our friend, Hammurabi, who was a Martu or an Amorite, was king in Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so let’s talk about the city Ur itself, because this is the actual town that Abraham lived in. He didn’t just live in the empire; he lived in Ur. So what does that city actually look like in his time and leading up to that?

Fr. Stephen: This is the capital, and so this is the central hub of civilization, literally in the world at the time, because even the civilizations that aren’t actually a part, that aren’t actually under Ur’s control, like Egypt and the Indus River Valley civilizations, are trading with and through Ur’s dynastic empire, because—

Fr. Andrew: All roads lead to Ur, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: So this is the center and this is the hub, and so Ur was already a very old city at the time that Abram lived there. So the area was initially settled in the period around—and this is very rough, because there’s sort an initial settlement that’s buried under a layer of sediment—say that five times fast! That original settlement which is, I guess ur-Ur, if you will.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh! [Laughter] Wow. I don’t know why I didn’t see that coming, but I really should have at some point in this episode. I… It just… I don’t know. I’m getting slow.

Fr. Stephen: And the settlement came into existence because, at the time, it was located at the place where the River Euphrates flowed into the Persian Gulf, where it met the Persian Gulf. So it was a coastal settlement. And because it’s sort of in a river delta, the river would cause it to flood every year: you had very fertile soil.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Just like Louisiana!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or the Nile Delta, or… Yeah. So this was a good place. Because of the flooding, you could plant crops in the fertilized soil that washed down the river. So this settlement starts somewhere around the middle of the [70th] century BC, and what first seems to happen is that there was an agricultural settlement. They dug sort of irrigation canals within the delta area, and then the city grew up and was structured around those irrigation canals, because things like defense became needed as it grew.

Now, if you go to the remains of Ur today—

Fr. Andrew: Which is in Iraq.

Fr. Stephen: Which is in Iraq now… I’ve seen photos of a number of folks who served in the US military who were deployed over there and got pictures next to the ziggurat. You can go there now and, if you’ve been there, you’re probably going: “It’s in the middle of the desert. What do you mean, it’s a coastal city?”

Fr. Andrew: Right. Things change when you’re talking thousands of years. Climate change happens, and climate change happened to Ur. It was on the coast, and then the Persian Gulf receded, a lot, and now it’s a long ways from the coast.

Fr. Stephen: The water level in the Persian Gulf since the 21st century BC has gone down about ten feet.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is miles and miles of land.

Fr. Stephen: And so it is now very far from the Persian Gulf, but at the time it was there where it met. And the original settlers of the area were Semitic people, so more like Akkad, but then the Sumerians showed up from somewhere—they’re not aliens! They are not aliens!

Fr. Andrew: We’re not saying it was aliens, but it’s not aliens. Still not aliens.

Fr. Stephen: Someone out there is going: “Ah, see! They’re aliens.” They’re not aliens! [Laughter] So they showed up from somewhere around 3300 BC. And they sort of migrated in from somewhere. The only accounts we have of where they came from, which were written in cuneiform much after the fact, say they came from the sea.

Fr. Andrew: And just to remind everybody, cuneiform is the alphabet that was used by ancient Sumerian—and for some other languages in the area.

Fr. Stephen: It’s not really an alphabet.

Fr. Andrew: Well, okay, the writing system, okay, excuse me.

Fr. Stephen: Um, actually… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, yes. Writing system.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which evolved from pictographs. But cuneiform, especially Sumerian cuneiform, there’s like hundreds and hundreds of symbols. It is very difficult to learn cuneiform. Take it from me; I’ve tried. [Laughter] Later on, in Akkadian, it gets standardized to about 60 characters that are commonly used, and that’s hard enough. And when I say “characters,” I mean it’s different patterns of wedge imprints.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and they look a lot alike. They look a lot like each other.

Fr. Stephen: Three vertical and one horizontal. Three vertical, two horizontal. Two vertical, two horizontal! [Laughter] Yeah, but they evolved from sort of pictographs, in the same way that you get…

Fr. Andrew: Like Chinese characters.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and Hieratic, in Egypt, sort of evolves from pictographs. But, yeah, those accounts saying they came from the water probably mean somewhere to the east, but we don’t know where, and we’re not sure what they were. Their language gives us zero clues because it’s a language isolate. We don’t have Sumerian DNA to test it and see what they were ethnically, so we don’t know—

Fr. Andrew: But they’re not aliens.

Fr. Stephen: They’re not aliens! [Laughter] They may have been Indo-Europeans who came from, like, India, that direction, but we don’t know, and likely never will. Who knows? But likely never will.

So they came, and they didn’t come and like conquer Ur. They just sort of moved into the area and intermarried with the settlement already there, to produce the early population of Ur. The Ur I dynasty, which does exist, unlike Ur II, started around 2550 BC, so about the middle of the 26th century BC. The city, when Ur-Nammu came to power and started the Ur III dynasty, he did a massive building project in the whole city of Ur to sort of revitalize it and build it up as a capital and a powerful city. Most prominently, he built the great ziggurat of Ur, the remains of which are still there, although it’s been repaired a couple times—thousands of years apart, but a couple times.

And that was finished near the end, actually, of the Ur III period. And that ziggurat… As we’ve talked about, ziggurats were… The Sumerian ka-dingirra means “gate of the gods.” And so this is sort of a human construction of the holy mountain, of the mountain of the god, to try to draw him down and bring him down there. And in this case—

Fr. Andrew: Used for worship.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and in this case, it was… The Sumerian name of the god is Nanna, N-a-n-n-a; the Akkadian name is Sin, S-i-n—

Fr. Andrew: Which is not related to the English word “sin” at all.

Fr. Stephen: No, no.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not connected.

Fr. Stephen: Or Sinai or any of that.

Fr. Andrew: A moon god, which is interesting because anyone who’s studied mythology, most of the moon deities you run into are usually female, but actually there’s a lot of male… moon gods depicted as male in the ancient world. More common than the female gods, I think, in that period, if I remember correctly.

Fr. Stephen: If you go that far back, yes. And this one is male, even though “Nanna” sounds like a feminine name—

Fr. Andrew: To us, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: —that’s actually a male figure. So that’s… the city of Ur is dedicated to this god. That is the god of the city. As these cities sort of gained and lost power, the gods of these cities were seen to gain and lose power in the heavens, and this would also be connected to astronomical signs, because of course, astronomically, those are the gods, too. So those are bodies of the god, too. So the actual moon in the sky is one of the bodies of Nanna, as is the idol on top of the ziggurat in the temple. So these things are all connected. I was about to go on a digression, but I won’t, about Enlil. We’ll do that another time. [Laughter]

So when Ur comes to prominence, so does Ur’s moon-god, over… in terms of the other gods. It’s not… We think of these pantheons… We think of the Greek gods; the Greek pantheon as like the Justice League, like the team-up of all the gods. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no. It’s more like a confederation of local deities, local to particular places. Yeah, okay, so here’s a question probably a lot of people might have. I mean, when we encounter Ur in the Bible, in Genesis, it’s referred to as Ur of the Chaldees or Ur of the Chaldeans. But actually that’s… No one at the time, in Abraham’s time, would have called it that, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. He had no idea what a Chaldean was, or that he was one, if he was one. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that term comes from a lot later, something like 1400-1500 hundred years after Abraham.

Fr. Stephen: 1500 years later, yeah. So the Chaldeans proper refers to the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the new Babylonian Empire, from the sixth century BC. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which at one point was headed up by our friend, Nebuchadnezzar, whose real name was Nabu—correct me if I get this wrong—Nabu-kudurri-usur.

Fr. Stephen: -utsor.

Fr. Andrew: -utsor, oh, yeah, okay, which means: “Nabu, watch over my heir.” It was… The name itself was a prayer to their god.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and this is why sometimes in more recent English translations you’ll see his name transliterated as Nebuchadrezzar, trying to get that kudurri part.

Fr. Andrew: I love the Anglicized, Hellenized Nabouchadnosor. That’s my favorite!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! So this is sort of a wild anachronism, but there’s something theological going on here in Genesis, which is the reason why the editor at this point puts in this sort of reference, of calling it Ur of the Chaldees, is that Chaldeans were the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and so this serves to connect the civilization that Abraham came from to Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, even though they’re not literally in exactly the same spot. It’s the same region…

Fr. Stephen: And we’re 500 years off, before the first Babylonian Empire, even: we’re 500 years before that. But, theologically, we’re connecting these, not to connect it to Hammurabi, but to connect it to Babel.

Fr. Andrew: The Tower of Babel.

Fr. Stephen: Babilim, the gate of heaven, the Tower of Babel, that ziggurat.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this is reflected, if you look at the actual biblical text, by the way that the story gets told. You know, in Genesis 10, you’ve got the Tower of Babel story—

Fr. Stephen: Eleven.

Fr. Andrew: Eleven, excuse me, sorry. You’ve got the Tower of Babel story, and then there’s this genealogy, but the genealogy actually makes it so that you’ve got, what, Noah’s son, Shem, and then—boom—Abraham’s father, which…

Fr. Stephen: Then it goes to Abraham’s father, so the genealogy doesn’t start at the Tower of Babel and go from the Tower—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it actually starts way earlier.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it doesn’t go from the Tower of Babel to Abraham; it goes from the flood to Abraham, essentially.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s this whole compression going on, without any indication that that’s what’s happening, but these things are being put together… I mean, in some ways it’s like when… I mean, setting aside all of the theological importance of this, when they refer to Jesus as the son of David, it doesn’t mean that his father’s name was David, but it’s connecting him directly to David, and that’s a similar kind of narrative way of using this sort of language.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is a way of connecting them directly. We go straight from the Tower of Babel into Abraham’s story, and that connects these two stories theologically, rather than going through a narrative of exactly how much time passed, which would then serve to disconnect them. There’s sort of this immediate segue. And there are sort of Jewish legends, and I call them that, because these aren’t really from Second Temple literature; these are rabbinic stories that get written down, but the rabbinic stories, when they get written down, are finally writing down oral tradition that goes back before it. So we’re not sure exactly where they originate, but there’s a number of them and a number of variations, but they’re canonical for no one. [Laughter] That connects Abrahm directly to the Tower of Babel story.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that he’s living next to the construction of the great ziggurat of Ur, which is then sort of conflated with the Tower of Babel, which is connected, then, also with the Babylonian Empire. All of those things are kind of piled up on top of each other.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so you get these stories of Nimrod being angry at Abram because he won’t worship the pagan gods, and trying to throw him into the brick kiln. I mean, there’s a whole… There’s all these elaborate stories. Yeah, and part of it is riffing on a really obscure point is that “Ur” can actually mean in old Canaanite and very early Hebrew, “Ur” can actually mean “fire.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s fun.

Fr. Stephen: So they decided to translate… When God said to Abram, “I saved you out of Ur of the Chaldeans,” they translated that as “the fire of the Chaldeans,” and then elaborated that into the whole brick kiln story and all of that.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, like the Three Holy Children.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so you can see these different pieces of oral tradition about Abram’s life, that he was there when they were building the great ziggurat and the Tower of Babel story and the story of the Three Youths and Babylon all kind of get mingled together in this oral mish-mash. [Laughter] And that ends up getting written down in the rabbinic period.

But there’s also another connection here, and that’s that I mentioned that there were a couple of periods, many centuries apart, where there were rebuilding efforts for the great ziggurat in Ur, and the first of those was actually by Nabonidus, who was the last Neo-Babylonian emperor, who came and rebuilt it. So the great ziggurat of Ur that was first constructed in Abram’s time was repaired and rebuilt by the Chaldeans in the Neo-Babylonian Empire, so that’s yet another connection.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they themselves were actually connecting themselves to this ancient civilization that they— I mean, there was a cultural connection, although with a lot of time passing between them.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, somewhat strained by that point, but yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. Well, all right, having painted that picture of the civilization that Abraham grew up in, we’re going to go ahead and go to break, and we’ll be right back and we’ll take some of your calls. So let’s go to break!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back! This is the second part of our show, and it’s where we begin to take some of your calls; just like the Voice of Steve just said, you can call us at 855-AF-RADIO; again, 855-237-2346. Before we do that, I actually realized that last time when we had our show, two weeks ago, I totally forgot to mention—and I don’t know if this is evidence of my staggering humility or what—

Fr. Stephen: Creeping old age.

Fr. Andrew: Creeping, yeah, that’s quite likely: senility. [Laughter] But I totally forgot to mention actually that just two days before that show, that I had a new book that’s out. So I’ve got a new book. It’s called Arise, O God: The Gospel of Christ’s Defeat of Demons, Sin, and Death, and it’s published by Ancient Faith Publishing. You can get it at store.ancientfaith.com, and the point of the book is it’s a summary of the Gospel from an Orthodox point of view, and especially if you listen to this show then you’re going to see demons all over it, because actually the Gospel has a whole lot to do with demons.

So what I do in the book is, at the beginning I actually talk about what is a gospel and how it’s actually not what most people these days in 21st-century American Christianity say that it is; then talk about what the Gospel is from the actual biblical point of view; and then I ask the question: Well, why is there a Gospel at all? What’s wrong? Why does there need to be a Gospel? And then I describe the actual contents of the Gospel and then get to the point where you actually ask: Okay, wait, what do I have to do to be saved? Because—spoiler alert!—the Gospel is not “This is how you get saved.” The question, “What do I do to be saved?” is the response to the Gospel. And then I talk about what happens when someone actually does respond to it and gets on board.

I just wanted to mention it because I know that those of you who listen to this show, it will be right up your alley. It is a short book. You can probably read the whole thing in the space of a couple of hours. There’s paperback version; there’s ebooks—you can get that from OrthodoxChristianeBooks.com. It’s also on Kindle, and there’s an audiobook version as well, which you can get through Audible and also Apple Books. So I hope you’ll check it out. It’s been selling really well the last couple of weeks, thanks be to God for all of you who have gotten it so far: thank you. And we’d love to hear from you what you think about it. Please, write a review on Amazon or wherever else you want to write reviews, and that would be helpful so that more people can get to it. Especially if you’re clergy and listening, I just want to suggest to you that this book would be really good for your evangelistic work and also for your catechetical work, for people who are coming to your parish for the first time and also for people [who] are being raised in your parish and need to be trained in this core question of what exactly is the Gospel.

So, I mean, yeah, it’s a little bit of an advertisement, but if you’re listening to this show, you’re going to be into this, so do check it out. I know a lot of you have so far. Thanks a lot for doing that.

Fr. Stephen: Allow me to say—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, thank you.

Fr. Stephen: Your new book is Lilliputian in size, but—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, it’s quite small!

Fr. Stephen: —but Brobdignagian in scope.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh, nice, nice!

Fr. Stephen: And I just wanted to promote it Swiftly—

Fr. Andrew: Nice, beautiful.

Fr. Stephen: —because you came to me and told me you were writing it, and I said, “Well, that sounds like a Modest Proposal.”

Fr. Andrew: Thank you.

Fr. Stephen: And now I’m wondering how long you’ll let me keep doing this.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] No, I was… It was beautiful. It was beautiful while it lasted!

Fr. Stephen: Okay. Jonathan Swift > Jonathan Edwards. Don’t “at” me!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Amen, amen. So we have a couple of calls coming in. One of them is Dolly calling from Atlanta. So, Dolly, are you there?

Dolly: I am. Hello, Fathers!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. We’re glad to have you. What’s on your mind?

Dolly: Well, I have a throw-back to “Eating with the Gods,” and “Sacrifices of Righteousness.” So it really kind of turned my head upside-down how I thought of worship, as a meal with your God. And it made me think about the function of the family table, and it made me want to think about it sacramentally, but then I didn’t want to overstep my bounds, theologically speaking. So I was wondering about, in a kind of… If we’re trying to un-modern ourselves and live our lives more in touch with the unseen as well as the seen, what are some ways that we can do that? The first thing I thought about was the family table, but other sort of practical ways that we can live in a more sacramental manner—other than the obvious: reading your Bible and praying and attending Mass and all that.

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah, I mean, that’s an excellent question. I think that the family table is the place to start because, in a lot of ways in modern, materialist America, it’s kind of the last sacrament that might exist for some people, but even that’s being torn apart, where many families… A lot of the time, family mealtime is not family mealtime, it’s just people showing up to the table every so often with something they got out of the fridge. But so, I think the pattern that’s going on when people worship God by offering sacrifice, especially the Eucharist within the Christian context, that same kind of thing, although in a different way—it’s not identical when you sit down together with your family and have dinner—but there’s something very similar happening there, and I think that the way to… the biggest way to underline that it is a… I’m trying to think of the best way to talk about it. It is an enchanted, sacramental thing that we’re doing when we do that, is to begin, obviously—

Dolly: I kind of want to ask a Pageauvian question: What is the symbolism of the table?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, right! Well, I mean, it’s about sharing life and becoming like one another and becoming part of one another. I mean, that’s what’s going on when you offer a sacrifice to a god: he becomes part of your community, you become part of his. And so when people eat together all the time, they become part of each other, and they change one another. So part of the reason that we then pray before the meal—and then, in Orthodox tradition, after the meal as well—is that it binds it all together with a blessing from God and reveals the meal to be what it truly is supposed to be, which is actually a salvific experience for everybody involved. But, you know, you can transfer that model to almost anything that you do, especially communally. Like if you’re going to take a trip together, to pray beforehand and after, and try to sanctify it along the way as much as possible. I don’t know; Fr. Stephen, is there anything you wanted to add or expand on or “Um, actually…”?

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah, I mean, just building off of that… The family’s eating meals together is one of many things, but sometimes one of the first things we notice in terms of our complete alienation from each other and the rest of creation. We don’t spend time with other humans any more. We sit next to them and look at our phones, or we sit next to them, and one person’s reading something and another person’s watching television, but we don’t actually spend time together doing things. So there are a lot of things that may almost seem quaint and overly wholesome and silly to us now, but—planting a garden and taking care of it together, taking care of animals together, creating things and making things together. This is what people used to do. [Laughter] They would go and make something with wood or make something with fabric.

And doing it together and spending that time together and reconnecting in any way we can, and trying to reestablish a sense of community. The best place—the only place to start now for that is our churches. There used to be—70 years ago, there was the VFW hall and the Union hall and the Lions Club and the Rotary and lodges and this and that and the other, where people would go out in public and spend time with other humans in community. And there was a problem at the time, because those kind of pulled people away from the church community into these other, sometimes secularized, sometimes other kinds of communities.

But now those are all gone, and we don’t have them at all. There is no place now, especially after COVID, where we go out and spend time in public with other people in our community, except for our churches. So that’s the only place to begin to connect with people even beyond our immediate family, and try to extend those social bonds back out, because we weren’t made to live as alienated, isolated individuals, and we weren’t even made to live as nuclear families. The nuclear family is a weird thing that’s come up since industrialization. We’re made to live in extended families and communities and villages together, and be part of each other’s lives and be connected to a hundred other people and to plants and animals and crops and the world around us. So trying to rebuild that, starting with small steps, is the way to go.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, I hope that’s helpful to you, Dolly. Thank you very much for calling in.

Dolly: May I ask quickly—may I ask quickly: What would a correct blessing look like?

Fr. Andrew: A correct blessing look like?

Dolly: Mm-hmm, I mean, saying grace. What would it need to include?

Fr. Andrew: There’s all kinds of Orthodox prayer books which have various meal blessings, so there’s a lot of versions of them. Usually almost always they include some kind of thanksgiving to God and an asking that he would bless not just the food but also the people that are there. But there’s short ones, there’s long ones… They’re all good!

Dolly: Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much. Okay, we’re going to take one more caller, and then we’re going to move on. So we’ve got Salvatore calling from Houston. Salvatore, welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast.

Salvatore: Thank you, Fathers. And I also kind of have a throw-back to the “Eating with the Gods” episode. My question is from the book of Samuel. Everything seems kind of wompy-jawed. Samuel doesn’t seem to be a priest, but he’s offering sacrifice at high places. The ark of the covenant is hanging out at someone’s house for 25 years. Other priests are sleeping with women at the tabernacle. God seems to be okay with Samuel offering sacrifice, but not Saul. What’s happening!?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m going to hand that right to you, Fr. Stephen.

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. Well, so Samuel had two roles. He’s kind of unique biblically in this regard, in that he was the prophet of God and he was the last judge of Israel. The book of Judges ends, and so sometimes we don’t realize that, but if you read the text of 1 Samuel or 1 Kingdoms carefully, it refers to it: “Samuel judged Israel from this time to this time.” Several times, that’s the verb that’s used. So he has this sort of unique role, but part of what prophets do and part of what they’re called by God to do is to enact a judgment against the corrupt Israelite institutions. Like in our last episode, when we talked about St. Elias or the Prophet Elijah: he was enacting this kind of judgment against Ahab and Jezebel, and the king, because the monarchy of the northern kingdom had become utterly corrupt.

So this also happens with the Temple or tabernacle and the priesthood, that sometimes when that has become corrupt—and you point out to one example of how it became corrupt during that period, but there are more—because the priesthood had become corrupt, God then uses his prophet to enact, by having him do the sacrifices and by having him do them somewhere else and excluding the priests, that’s an act of judgment against that priesthood. God is sort of taking that right and that privilege away from them and giving it to someone else as a form of enacting judgment.

This dynamic sort of happens again in the book of Jeremiah, that one of the themes in the book of Jeremiah is that everyone is sort of placing their confidence in the Temple, that the place where God’s presence is, where his Spirit is, where he’s placed is name—is in the Temple, and in actuality the Temple was about to be destroyed, even though they believed, “Well, God will never let his own Temple be destroyed, so we’ll have to be safe.” [Laughter] But in actuality, the Spirit, God’s presence, God’s name, had been placed in Jeremiah himself. So Jeremiah sort of becomes the Temple, in a sense, as a judgment against the corruption of the Temple and the priesthood at the time.

So Samuel is sort of the one faithful prophet during a lot of that period. Basically until David shows up, he’s about it. And so God’s presence is with Samuel, and so the true sacrifices are being offered by Samuel. The true leader of Israel is Samuel because of Saul’s faithlessness and shenanigans. So, yeah, that’s how that works in the Old Testament.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, there you go, Salvatore.

Salvatore: Okay, cool. Thanks, you guys.

Fr. Andrew: Thanks for calling in. All right, well, rolling on… So Genesis 1-11, this is where all the bad things in the world come from, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: You know: death, sin, demons. Oh, buy my book, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! Read more about this stuff!

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly!

Fr. Stephen: And of course there was the… We’ve talked about how there are these sort of three fall events. So we’re not going to go through all that again right here, because, as we just mentioned before the break, Abram’s story really is intended—the way Genesis is constructed, is intended to follow directly on after the Tower of Babel. We kind of want to focus on that one just a little bit in that remembering that what’s going on there is not just like: “Oh hey, now everybody talks different languages,” but that what’s going on there is, as we’ve talked about before, God’s presence was with humanity before the flood. And humanity became so sinful that they experienced mass death-by-holiness through God’s own holiness sort of wiping them out.

So after the flood he sets his bow in the clouds and says, “I’m no longer going to make war with man,” and so he’s not going to destroy humanity again in that way. So then when we come up to—we see Nimrod; we see the giant thing happening again—when the Tower of Babel happens, rather than God remaining and destroying humanity, he departs. This is the other option is he can leave; he can depart.

Fr. Andrew: And he hands over the rule of the nations to angels, who then rule them by proxy. And as we’ve seen before, of course, they fall because they accept worship, and that’s the origin of paganism, according to the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this third problem, this problem of the fallen powers and principalities, is set up by the Tower of Babel, and then we immediately go into Abram.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s funny, because it’s… So Genesis 12, it just says, “And God talked to Abram.” He doesn’t show up and say, “Oh hey, I’m I am. That’s who you should call me.” There’s none of that.

Fr. Stephen: “I’m Yahweh, and I’m the Most High God”—yeah, there’s no introduction, it’s just: “And Yahweh said to Abram.”

Fr. Andrew: Which indicates he already knows him.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Abram already knows Yahweh.

Fr. Stephen: That this is a relationship that already exists. So this means that Abram is our first example, but not the last—there’s going to be another one within Abram’s story, that being Melchizedek, whom we’re going to talk about in our next episode…

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: But there’s Melchizedek also—who are people, despite what happened at the Tower of Babel—and we talked about… you can see this even in anthropology and sociology texts, that gradually the most-high god sort of retreats into the background of pagan religion and the focus all falls to the sort of lesser members of the pantheon, the local gods. That Abram and Melchizedek—and there are going to be some others—have remained faithful to the worship of the Most High God, of Yahweh.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, one of the questions we sometimes get in regards to this problem with the fall after Babel is that… We’ll get: “Did no nation stay faithful to Yahweh?” And the answer to that is: No, no nation did, but some people did. Some people did. So the nations have fallen, but there are a handful of people who are still worshiping the one, true God, and Abram is one of them.

Fr. Stephen: Right, Abram has remained faithful. So even though this story in Genesis 12 is kind of called “The Call of Abram,” and that might give us the idea that this is something like the calls of the prophets that we’re going to see—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not like that; he doesn’t get taken up to heaven, or—

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul, or—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s no big vision. Yeah, none of that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and even the languages used later… Yahweh says to him, “Walk before me and be righteous.” And that “walk” language is being picked up from earlier in Genesis in the garden. So there is this ongoing life of faithfulness that Abraham is carrying out. This isn’t just an observation St. Paul makes later, like: “Wow, that Abraham was a really faithful guy.” This is the crux of what’s going on from his very introduction.

But, as you just mentioned, these are isolated individuals, so even Abram’s own father is set up in the text to not have been a worshiper of Yahweh, the Most High God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it mentions that he’s a pagan, actually, in Joshua 24:2. It says that he doesn’t worship. And it’s remembered all those years later.

Fr. Stephen: He’s singled out in Joshua. Joshua is speaking and says, “Our ancestors lived beyond the rivers in Mesopotamia and worshiped other gods, including Terah, Abram’s father.” So he gets singled out for that. And we see that also in the narrative itself, in the end of Genesis 11 and Genesis 12. The end of Genesis 11, the end of the genealogy is actually Terah, and what it says at the end of Genesis 11 is that Terah takes his family, which includes Abram and Nahor and Lot and Haran, and is going to take them to Canaan, but he stops in Haran and stays there until Terah dies. Then that story gets retold in Genesis 12, where Yahweh comes to Abram and tells him to go to Canaan, and Abram stops and stays with his father, Terah, in Haran until he dies, and then goes on and completes the journey. It’s not a coincidence that Haran is another city, another Mesopotamia city where the same moon-god is being worshiped.

Fr. Andrew: So even though the Scripture doesn’t say this explicitly, there’s almost a suggestion that Terah got this call to make the move, but failed to carry it out, and Abram is the one who actually then does it. And, again, it’s not explicit, but it’s sort of suggested because why… There is this move in that direction, but he stops and doesn’t go on. He gets tangled up in the worship of that god that they had been worshiping back in Ur as well.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so, because of this, because Abram is so different, even within his own family—and we’re going to see Lot doesn’t always do so great later on in the story of Abram and his life—because Abram is sort of different and set apart in this way, this is known—this is built into the text. So in Second Temple literature and other stories where you see this figure of Abram, there is always incorporated this kind of enmity and alienation between him and the surrounding world, where this kind of evil paganism, this idolatry, sexual immorality, these things are going on, and he’s sort of set apart from that, and that creates this enmity between him—there’s a hostility of the world. And this is… He sort of talks about this, this quoted line where he talks about being a stranger in a strange land, that he’s sort of alienated. St. Peter picks up on this, saying that we should live like that, that we should live like aliens and foreigners in the world, because, of course, we’re all too comfortable compared to Abram in civilization. But Abram is sort of set apart because of that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so he lives out as a nomad, so he’s not part of this civilization, the Ur civilization, which, I mean, is kind of an ascetical image as well, that he’s separate from all of the benefits that are existing in civilization as well. So then it’s in that context that God gives to him these promises.

Fr. Stephen: And before we move on, just to add… This is a theme sort of throughout Abram’s story. The places where he or someone in his family get in trouble is when they try to go back to civilization. The two times Abram visits Egypt, he gets into trouble. When Lot goes and moves down next to Sodom, he gets into trouble. There’s this sort of pull to come back into the world and back into the world civilization, and that’s leading to destruction.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay, so then in Genesis 12, when God speaks to Abram, he initially gives him the first version of the promises to him. This is in verses two and three. God says:

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

And it’s particularly notable here that one of the things that’s happening is that God is the God of Abraham and not the God of a place. He’s the God of a person, not the God of a place. We talked about this at some length in our Pentecost episode, which was titled “An Immaculate Dwelling Place,” so if you’re interested in that question, go back and listen to that. But then the promises get reiterated three times and kind of expanded out.

Fr. Stephen: Right, they get fleshed out.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so I’m going to just read those real quick in succession. Then we’re going to talk about what they say. So Genesis 15:5:

Then Yahweh brought Abraham outside, saying, “Look now towards the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he told him, “So will your seed be.”

Genesis 22:17:

“I will surely bless you and greatly multiply your seed like the stars of heaven and like the sand which is on the shore of the sea, and your seed will occupy the gate of their enemies.”

And then Genesis 26:4:

But I will multiply your seed as the stars of heavens, and I will give to your seed all these lands, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed in your seed.”

Okay, what’s going on? What’s going on within…? Okay, there’s several different elements to this promise that God is giving him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so… little pieces. Every time he reiterates those promises, there are little nuances and pieces and angles that get added and fleshed out there. So first and foremost, and probably the most obvious one, that there’s sort of a quantitative element to these promises. Abram is 75 years old and has no children. And his name, Abram, means “great father.” So most likely Terah named him that, referring to himself, of course.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He’s got a great father!

Fr. Stephen: But it leaves this kind of bitter irony that he’s childless. So there is this quantitative element, that he’s not just going to have descendants, but he’s going to have this vast multitude, like the sands of the seashore, and that nations, plural, are going to come from him: that is part of the promise, not just Israel, but nations are going to come from him. And all the nations of the world, meaning the 70 nations, are all going to be blessed through him, that it’s through him that God is eventually going to call those nations back who were scattered at Babel.

But then there’s also, in addition to that quantitative promise, there’s also a qualitative element, and so you see that in the first quote that you read from Genesis 15:5, when he says, “Look at the heavens and count the stars if you are able to number them.” He says, “So will your seed be.” He doesn’t say, “So many will your seed be.” “Your descendants will be like the stars.”

Fr. Andrew: “In this way.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this isn’t just me trying to be tricksy with the original language or something. This is something that our earliest interpreters saw. So Exhibit A of this is Philo of Alexandria who saw this very clearly, and here’s a couple citations for you from Philo. He refers to this in his treatise Who is the Heir of Divine Things in section 17, and he refers to this in Questions and Answers in Genesis, book four, section 181, where you can see that where he directly talks about the fact that this is referring to Abram’s seed becoming “like the stars,” not “as many as the stars.” This, of course, as we talked about earlier, if you’re part of the Sumerian Renaissance, you understand that the sun, moon, and stars in the sky are bodies of the gods, the lower gods, the small-g gods, the gods who are now reigning over the cities—whom Abram doesn’t worship, by the way; he worships the Most High God. But these other beings, these beings who have provoked this hostility between him and the world, they’re going to become like them.

And that includes, then, a second element that we see in the prophecy in Genesis 22:17 that you read, that “your seed [would] occupy the gates of [their] enemies.” So the city gate was… We would think of the city… People get the key to the city, and it doesn’t actually open anything, but the gates of a city—the cities in the ancient world had these protected walls, to protect from attack and invasion. And the gates, therefore, you had to have them be the strongest part of your defenses, but also the city gate is where the administration of the city took place. The elders of the city would sit at the city gates. That’s where they would hear cases, the equivalent of court cases, and decide disputes. That’s where you’d go to ratify a contract or an agreement. That’s where marriages and divorces and these kind of things happened.

So all of these things take place at the city gate. So the city gate is sort of the center of power of the city, not the fringe of the city. So if you’re camping in your enemy’s city gates, that means you have taken control of their center of power; you have taken control of their city. So this adds to this element of displacement, that they’re going to become like them and replace them as they are punished.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. So we’re getting—unfortunately, as you guys know, a hurricane hit Louisiana not that long ago and has kind of done some damage to the infrastructure, the infrastructure there, so we’re going to get Fr. Stephen hopefully switched over to our backup system here.

But, yeah, so okay, we were just talking about these promises to Abraham and what the point of all the things going on there… What kind of summarizes some of this is, again, this Babel context. Again, remember the Abraham story follows immediately on the Babel story. The Babel story establishes the idea that these hostile, fallen principalities are governing mankind now, and so the promises given to Abraham are specifically about judging and displacing those hostile principalities. That’s what’s going on there. So that’s how these—that’s one of the ways that these things are connected.

All right—okay, Father, you’re there! All right, good.

Fr. Stephen: And so these two obviously go together: the judgment and replacement are jointly connected to each other. The next little piece we have to talk about in these promises, of course, is that there is this sort of other-ment; there’s sort of this material element to go with that spiritual element. Sometimes, especially among some of our fellow Christians who aren’t necessarily members of the Orthodox Church, that material element tends to take the whole focus, rather than the spiritual element we were just talking about. In fact, that spiritual element is almost gone; that concept of basically theosis that we’re talking about is basically gone and replaced with: “They’re going to have this particular strip of land in Palestine” and—

Fr. Andrew: Oh! All right, Fr. Stephen, did we lose you? Well. It’s live radio, everybody. [Laughter] He was connected to mine, Bobby. Sorry, we’re…

Fr. Stephen: Am I back?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, welcome back. Okay.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know where exactly I got cut, but the spiritual element we were talking about, which is basically theosis, sort of drops out in a lot of contemporary discussion of the promises to Abraham and is sort of completely displaced by the material element of the land, the physical land, and the quantitative element of the number of descendants.

Fr. Andrew: Lots of descendants!

Fr. Stephen: And so to understand how those two things are related to each other, the material element and the spiritual element of the promises—because it’s not that the material element isn’t there and it’s just the spiritual element—we have to kind of understand the connection between prophecy and signs, as it exists in Scripture.

When a prophecy is given, very often an accompanying sign is given, because a prophecy is going to have some kind of fulfillment that is not immediately visible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s a kind of down payment, so to speak. Like: “Okay, something big is going to happen, and I’m going to show you this to prove that it’s going to happen.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and a really obvious and well known one, thanks to Linus Van Pelt, is in Luke 2. Yeah, he has a Dutch last name; did you ever think about that?

Fr. Andrew: I never thought about that! One of the Peanuts was Dutch. But there we go.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So was Lucy.

Fr. Andrew: Right!?

Fr. Stephen: In Luke 2, after the stars have sung to the shepherds, the angel tells them to go, and he says, “This will be a sign to you.” He’s just announced to them the Messiah has been born, Savior of the world has been born; the Messiah is here. But they say, “This will be a sign to you: Go, you will find a Baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, lying in an animal food trough.” This is not something you normally see every day. [Laughter] So when they see this, this odd thing, then they will know that it is true that this Child is the Messiah. This sign will clue them in.

And this kind of goes the other way, too, because we find over and over again in the gospels people coming to Jesus after he preaches and after he teaches what he teaches and demanding a sign from him, saying, “Show us some sign so that we may believe you!” [Laughter] Like: “I don’t buy it!” And Christ, of course, refuses.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah: “The only sign I’m going to give you is the sign of Jonah.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, which is of course his death and resurrection. So, built into that answer is the fact that Christ’s death and resurrection proves that everything he taught and said was true.

So, that said, what we have here in terms of the material element of these promises is that the material element of these promises is the sign of the spiritual element. The material element of Abram’s descendants, the several nations descended from him, which biblically include not just Israel but also Edom and Amon and Moab, them coming into, at different times, into the land that Abram is promised, and overthrowing the giants there—the spiritual powers of evil whom the giants represent—that, on the visible level and the more immediate level—it’s still a few hundred years, but, on the more immediate level—is the proof, is the sign that the deification of Abram’s descendants, his faithful descendants, and their displacement of the powers and principalities in the heavenly places, is also a reality.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, yeah, so I just want to underline what you just said, because this is a super important point in this whole story. So, number one, Abraham has descendants other than Israel: the Edomites, the Moabites, and the Amonites. These are descendants of people like Esau, so it’s not necessarily this line, the main heir, but there are other descendants as well. And they also have driven off these demonized giant clans, and this is the sort of immediate sign that is the depiction of what’s going to actually, ultimately happen. Like, there is going to be… “Abraham, your seed is going to ultimately drive off all these dark powers, and to prove that to you, in the meantime, a bunch of your descendants actually successfully do this on a local level.” So that’s part of what’s going on in this story.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we read in Deuteronomy 2—and, of course, you can go back to the giants episode; we went through it in detail—all the different giant clans, how the Edomites drove the giant clans out of what became Edom, likewise with the Moabites, likewise with the Amonites, likewise with the Caphtorim, the Cretans, the Philistines, but you can read more or listen more about that on our giants episode, what the Greeks are doing there. [Laughter]

So the Abrahamites come in, and one of the things that’s sometimes pointed out by our friends who still want to focus on that material level of the promises and try to project that out into the future—you know who you are—

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] We’re looking at you, dispensationalists!

Fr. Stephen: Dallas is not that far from it! Right, so what they’ll say is, “Well, God actually promises to Abraham this huge tract of land, and Israel never controlled all that land.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so eventually they need to get it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but if you actually read Deuteronomy and you include all the other Abrahamites—you include the Midianites, who are Ishmaelites and Edomites; you include Edom, you include Moab, you include Amon, who are descended from Lot: you include all those groups, the Abrahamite groups—they did get that land, and it’s not just me saying so…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Joshua says it!

Fr. Stephen: Joshua says so twice.

Fr. Andrew: Especially as you get to the end of the book of Joshua, in Joshua 21:45, it says this explicitly. It says:

Not one word of all the good promises that the Lord had made to the house of Israel had failed. All came to pass.

And that was said right after all the land had been claimed, and not just by Israel, but by these other Abrahamite groups as well. So, promise fulfilled.

Fr. Stephen: You can look at Joshua 11:21-23 and 21:43-45. It directly refers to the giant clans being driven out; it directly refers to taking the land and says, “All the land promises made to Abram were therefore fulfilled.” They’re done, at the end of the book of Joshua.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: And so that then sets that part, the sign therefore is instantiated, and is instantiated in the Scriptures, in the earliest layer of the Hebrew Scriptures. So that then is the guarantee for us that the larger promise is going to come true. So it’s this—it’s this greater promise, of the theosis or the divinization or the deification—whatever word we want to choose—of the faithful descendants of Abraham, who receive this through their faithfulness, in the way Abram received the promises through his faithfulness to God, in the way he walked and lived his life, and remaining loyal and true to Yahweh, the God of Israel, and not following after idols and these other gods.

In the same way, this is what St. Paul goes back to when St. Paul talks about salvation. When he talks about salvation, when he sees salvation in Christ, St. Paul’s soteriology—his theology of salvation—is all based around this, is that now in Christ, through the incarnation and death and resurrection and ascension of Christ, those promises have now been completed, and that’s why he goes back to Abraham and talks about his faithfulness. That’s why he talks about his inheritance; he talks about being sons of Abraham. He talks about being heirs of the promises—inheritance, all of that language that St. Paul uses to talk about salvation comes from the now spiritual element of those promises.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that salvation is bound up, frankly, in spiritual warfare, and not just warfare and defeating those dark powers, but then the ascending of the descendants of Abraham. Yeah.

Okay, well, we’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back in a second, and we’re going to talk about something that a lot of you have asked us about, and that is Abraham and Isaac and exactly what they were doing up on top of that mountain. So let’s take a break!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back. It’s the third part of Lord of Spirits—

Fr. Stephen: The third half.

Fr. Andrew: The third half, excuse me; that is correct. It is the third half of Lord of Spirits, because this is a show and a half, everybody. [Laughter]

So we just finished talking about the promises made to Abraham, and we wrapped it up with the conclusion about what St. Paul has to say about salvation and how that connects to all of that. So now we’re going to be talking about Abraham and his son Isaac. Of course, this is an issue that we’ve got a lot of questions about, because when we started talking about sacrifice really explicitly a few months ago, many of you thought, “Well, wait: what about Abraham and Isaac? What’s going on there?” So now we’re going to go ahead and talk about Abraham and Isaac, and we’re going to begin with St. Paul. So, Father, what does St. Paul have to say about this particular… this scene, this image, of Abraham and Isaac?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there’s this one element left over from those promises that we didn’t really focus in on, and that’s that, over and over again, as you read those quotes from Genesis where God is reiterating the promises to Abram, the word “seed” is used. The promises are directed toward his seed. And in Hebrew, it’s ambiguous whether “seed” is singular or plural, because it’s a collective noun; zera is a collective noun. So it can be used for singular or for plural, sort of like “fish” in English: you can have one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And “seed” in English even functions that way. Like, we use it both as a collective noun and then also as a singular. In English, it can also function as a singular or plural, but I was thinking of “moose,” actually, when you mentioned that. Moose.

Fr. Stephen: Isn’t it “meese”? More than one would be meese? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It is not, in fact, “meese.” I know, disappointing.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. False friend, there. So there are places in the promises we read where it’s very clearly taking a plural form, because it will say, for example, talk about his seed, and they will camp in the gates of their enemies. So this is third person plural, so we know that “seed” there is plural. But there are other places where it’s more ambiguous, and it could be plural or singular, and there is a pre-existing—this pre-dates St. Paul—tradition of interpretation that several of these are actually singular. Then, in addition to the sort of quantitative promise that we were talking about, of having many descendants, that there’s also one particular descendant in view, through whom these promises will come to fruition for the plural seed, for all of the descendants.

Fr. Andrew: Seed and seeds, right.

Fr. Stephen: And so this tradition of interpretation is reflected in the Greek translation itself of several of these promises, because in Greek, sperma is not a collective noun. You can decline it as singular, or you can decline it as plural, and so they—

Fr. Andrew: Sperma and spermata, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so they had a choice to make when they translated it, and, in several cases, chose the singular. And St. Paul points to this singular, points to this, for example, in Galatians 3:16 as a sort of key part of his argument when he says that “now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring”—and this is, of course “seed”: “to Abraham and to his seed”—“it does not say ‘and to seeds,’ referring to many, but referring to one: ‘and to your seed, who is Christ.’ ”

Fr. Andrew: Right, so St. Paul is explicitly using both the singular and plural of the Greek and making a point based on that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so he is treating the Septuagint here as authoritative.

Fr. Andrew: As an authoritative interpretation of the Hebrew.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he’s saying this is… And when I say “authoritative,” it’s because he’s just pointing to it. And here in Galatians he’s arguing with fellow Judeans about the specific application of the Torah. So he clearly expects this Greek translation choice to carry authoritative weight with them. Otherwise this is a pointless argument, because if his fellow Judean Pharisees did not accept those decisions as authoritative, they could just laugh this argument off and say, “Well, that’s not what the Hebrew says; in the Hebrew it could be plural,” and take a different interpretation.

But so St. Paul obviously is applying this directly to Christ, saying that Christ is this singular Seed; he is this singular Son through whom these larger spiritual promises we talked about are now coming to fruition. But before that, this was most directly applied to Isaac: Isaac as the singular son of Abraham, even though Abraham had other children. So by applying it to Isaac, you have both that element of, yes, there are other children, but there is this singular son; there is this singular seed, this singular descendant who is the heir, and through whom the other children will receive the inheritance.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so there’s this emphasis, then, on Isaac in particular. I mean, this is going to set us up, then, for who is Isaac in terms of how he’s understood in terms of Second Temple literature and, frankly, in the New Testament and the whole Christian tradition.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and St. Paul explicitly uses this whole line of argumentation in Romans 9, where he’s talking about how the promises were not just evenly generically distributed to all of the biological descendants of Abraham, but that there was a singular— and he points to Isaac, and he points to Jacob and not Esau. Not that, as we were just talking about, in terms of the land— not that Esau and Ishmael and these others inherited nothing, but they received the promises through the heir, through this singular son.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because of the way that inheritance works in this time and place, which is the heir, who is usually the first-born son, but as we saw with Jacob and Esau not always—the heir is the one who inherits everything from the father, and then distributes to his brethren and sistren of that promise, that inheritance given to him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this firstborn is a status that you have, and you don’t have to have any other children for the one child that you have to have the firstborn status. There are people out there who know why that’s important. [Laughter]

And in the case of, like you pointed out, Jacob, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the chronologically firstborn; it means you have that status.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’re first—

Fr. Stephen: Birthright, as it’s translated in the King James.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because “first”—“first” in Greek— and, I mean, we use it in English in some ways, too, like “first” doesn’t necessarily mean, like you said, chronologically first; it just means the first among them, the one who is preeminent. It’s a place; it’s not necessarily a time. There’s a relationship between the two, like liturgically, for instance, the protos is the one who is actually celebrating the church service, and then everyone else is his concelebrants, and usually the protos is the one who is the most senior, which is often related to time. If you’ve been a priest longer than another priest who’s of your same rank, then you are the senior between the two, but not necessarily. Someone could get elevated to a rank that his higher than a priest who has been senior to him in time, and then he becomes… he would be the appropriate protos to serve when they were concelebrating together.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so this is the thrust of what St. Paul is doing in Romans 9, is that, faced with people who are saying, “Well, we’re the children of Abraham,” he’s saying, “Yes, but sort of the singular Son is Christ, and so if you are not in this relationship of faithfulness with Christ, you’re not going to inherit just by virtue of being a descendant.” But so what St. Paul is doing is he’s taking a whole set of imagery and understanding and interpretations of Isaac and applying them to Christ, and these Isaac-related traditions come out of the text of Genesis and then pre-exist and are developed and then St. Paul takes them to show how: See, this is how you connect Christ to this narrative.

Fr. Andrew: So Isaac becomes, then, a prefiguration of Christ in this particular way, in terms of being the heir, the seed of the promise, through whom the promises made to Abraham are then going to be distributed to all the brethren.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and in terms of that sign-prophecy relationship we were talking about, then Isaac, the physical son of Abram and Sarah, Isaac as a person becomes a sort of sign to Abraham of the eventual Seed who is coming, who will bring the fulfillment of those spiritual promises.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, especially because Isaac was not… what to expect when you’re not expecting to expect… right? [Laughter] Because Isaac was not—

Fr. Stephen: Age 100 and age 90.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right! He, he’s definitely a sign.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is… The term that’s used that the King James translation, in many places—this is not 100%—but the Greek word monogenes is kind of ambiguous, and it was interpreted in many places by the King James Version somewhat incorrectly in that it was taken to be “only-begotten” pretty much every time it’s used.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, well, I mean, let’s take the word apart for a second and explain why that might be the case, because you’ve got mono- which is “solitary” or “only” or “single,” and then -genes, which can mean your “child,” but it can also mean a “kind.”

Fr. Stephen: It could mean geno… There are two possible roots for the -genes part. Monos is clear; that’s “only” or “one,” but the -genes can come from genos, which is where we get “genus.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and “genetics” and that kind of thing.

Fr. Stephen: So a kind, a type, and then it becomes a species kind of idea. Or it could come from the verb genao, which is “to beget.”

Fr. Andrew: And obviously those two words are related to each other. [Laughter] Those words have a common root with each other, and, actually then are cognate—this is where Richard Rohlin will write in if I’m getting this wrong—I’m pretty sure are cognate with English words like “kin” and “kind,” actually. These are all connected.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so when you put it together into monogenes, depending on the conjugation or the declension and where it is in the sentence, it could kind of be either in a lot of cases.

Fr. Andrew: So either “only-begotten” or “one of a kind, unique.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. So in many places, though… And so the King James, because of that in a lot of people’s brains, even people who aren’t King James-only—like, now that’s the traditional thing, if they’re English speakers, so any questioning of it is questioning tradition— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s worth pointing out that the King James translation which I love, although, again, I’m not a KJV-only person—I love it for many reasons, not for every reason—because that’s the way that it’s translated there, then a lot of other texts, patristic texts that got translated into English in, say, the 19th century, for instance, which is where the big bunch that were first translated into English came from, they then kind of imitate the King James language in many cases for translations of patristic texts as well, thus carrying forward this English translation.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in many cases monogenes should really be translated as “unique.” John 1 is a case of this: the unique God, who was in the bosom of the Father—there, for example. But one of the reasons why that “unique Son” would be used is not just to differentiate Christ as the Son of God from other beings who are called sons of God—that’s one reason—but then also, on the other side, to connect to this tradition of Isaac as the “unique son” in terms of the relationship to Abraham. You can’t… This is a general translation thing, and this is a problem sometimes when people try to work with languages they don’t know that well, like using a concordance or that kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can’t just… I mean, you can’t just look a word up in your dictionary and assume that the first thing that it says—or maybe all ten things that it might say in an entry are the right thing for whatever it is that you’re trying to read or translate.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then just go and plug it in everywhere, and it must mean the same thing in all these places, and all these passages must be connected—that’s not true. You have to go by what’s being said in each case. So sometimes… And that’s when it becomes clear how monogenes is being used. Sometimes it’s very clear that it means “only-begotten,” that that’s the idea; sometimes it’s very clear that it’s “unique” in the sense of differentiating Christ from the angels and other sons of God; and sometimes it’s pretty clear that it’s connected to these Isaac traditions. Those traditions were—this is a less-common icon now, for reasons we’re about to describe—they were reflected in some of our iconography, in the form of what was called—this is many centuries ago—the paternity icon.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is an icon… Like, there’s two versions of this. There’s this more ancient and, dare I say, authentic icon, where you’ve got Abraham as an old man, and then in his lap is Isaac as a young child.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it’s sort of parallel to the icons you would see of the Theotokos with Christ on her lap.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly. The same basic look. And then there are also, then… I don’t know enough about iconography to say whether they are explicitly uncanonical, but certainly a kind of unconventional, for sure, an icon, a “Holy Trinity” icon, where you see the Father depicted as an old man, Christ depicted as a child, and then sometimes in his lap a bird for the Holy Spirit. Certainly that icon is controversial and, from what I understand, probably uncanonical, but, again, I am not an iconographer or an expert on iconography.

Fr. Stephen: Don’t “at” him.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, don’t “at” me! But, the point being that there are canonical versions of that that are expressing something that is uncontroversial, Abraham and Isaac.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the controversial ones seem to be in a line of descent from the uncontroversial ones. That the Abraham and Isaac icons were intended to— sort of in the way that, say, Andrei Rublev’s Trinity icon is meant to convey the Holy Trinity but not depict the Holy Trinity by showing the hospitality of Abraham.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and, in a sense, an icon of an icon; that Abraham and Isaac, as persons, are icons relating to the Father and the Son, and then we make an icon of that, of them being that. So it becomes very meta.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and in the same way that you will occasionally slip a little bit and not quite understand and say that Christ and the two angels in the Rublev Trinity icon are… “Well, this is the Holy Spirit and this is the Father.” Well, we know that it’s not accurate. It’s an icon situation. The same thing happened centuries ago with the paternity icons, where the “represent” slipped out, and people started saying, “Oh, well, this is the Father and Christ.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, so we’ve kind of established what Isaac’s place is, but within his story… I mean, he shows up in Jacob’s story, but within his story in Scripture, what is he actually doing? What is he actually accomplishing? There’s two things, so the one that everybody immediately goes to and thinks about first, which is totally appropriate, is the sacrifice of Isaac, the sort of attempted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. [Laughter] I know, it’s funny, we call it the sacrifice of Isaac. I’m like: Actually, he doesn’t get sacrificed, by the way… And then also he gets…

Fr. Stephen: But he sort of does symbolically, and we’re going to talk about that in a minute.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. Exactly. And then the other thing is that he gets married. Which, if you’ve ever been to an Orthodox wedding service, you know that this gets invoked: “Bless them, O Lord, as thou didst bless Isaac and Rebecca,” among other couples in the Scripture that are mentioned. I mean, let’s talk about that first, because the sacrifice is the much bigger elephant in the room, I guess. So what’s going on with the wedding to Rebecca? What does that mean other than, “Oh, hey, Isaac needed to get married so that he could have kids so that this whole big descendants thing could happen”?

Fr. Stephen: And he married a Mesopotamian rather than a Canaanite.

Fr. Andrew: Right!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] They go back to his people, and Abraham going back to his own people, actually in this case means Isaac is married to his first cousin. But, yeah, that’s not the point; it’s not about cousin-marriage. It is interesting because of what it says, and what it says is something that we gloss over very quickly sort of as modern Western people who have deeply imbibed the idea of romantic love.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it says, “Isaac loved Rebecca,” which, you know, that’s kind of… not even worth mentioning these days. Of course a husband loved his wife.

Fr. Stephen: Duh. That’s why they got married! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he must have loved her. But that is not… What is unremarkable now was totally remarkable then: the idea that a husband should love his wife was just not even on the radar.

Fr. Stephen: And it was an arranged marriage. The greater part of that story is that marriage being arranged by Abraham through one of his servants.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s no point where Isaac says—

Fr. Stephen: With his brother.

Fr. Andrew: There’s no point where Isaac is like: “I hope I meet somebody… Maybe we’ll click.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, they don’t run into each other, find out they have a lot of the same hobbies, grew up watching the same TV shows. [Laughter] So why is that important? Well, it’s not just that that’s rare in the ancient world, that expression of love, but it’s rare in the book of Genesis. This is… I mean, you do have Adam and Eve in a monogamous marriage, sort of, I mean, marriage, but it’s kind of dysfunctional! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t really see much about the marriage of Adam and Eve that looks that great. I mean, we don’t see most of it. We just kind of see mostly the bad parts, actually.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but you even look at Abraham, and he’s got concubines, and Jacob has two wives and a couple of concubines, all that he has kids with; Esau’s marrying pagans, and on and on; on and on. You have Reuben trying to sleep with one of his father’s concubines. I mean… So you don’t get a lot of solid, monogamous marriages in Genesis outside of Isaac and Rebecca. So they serve as this sort of icon of… They’re the ones in Genesis who do it the way God intended it. I say that’s the way God intended it, because Christ says that’s the way God intended it in the gospels. But that’s the image of doing it right, and so we have this, then, this pattern that after the story we’re about to talk about, the sacrifice of Isaac, that he then gets married. This is Isaac’s life, as his story is presented: this episode of sacrifice and then his marriage.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s important to note the sequence. He is offered up and then he gets married. So just hold that in your mind and let’s talk about the sacrifice.

Fr. Stephen: Right, by popular demand.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, indeed!

Fr. Stephen: So when we read it today—and this is partially Søren Kirkegaard’s fault, so something was rotten in the state of Denmark, and it ended up kind of fiddling with how we read this story… So we as modern people, when we read this story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac, we approach it from Abraham’s perspective. Abraham is the character into which we insert ourselves.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the big question being then is, if I’m Abraham and I hear a voice from God saying, “Okay, go offer your son and kill him and sacrifice him to me,” and, you know, especially listeners to this podcast will think, “And—wait, am I supposed to eat him?” [Laughter] That’s the big moral quandary: to kill or not to kill.

Fr. Stephen: By the way, since he brought all the kindling—there’s a whole kindling issue—presumably it would be a whole burnt-offering.

Fr. Andrew: A whole burnt-offering, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Just to ease people’s minds. He was not thinking about eating Isaac. That was not the plan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because as we’ve said there’s multiple kinds of sacrifices. While some of them do involve eating on the part of the people, not all of them do.

Fr. Stephen: Right, some of them you give the whole thing to God.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yeah, but then that’s not actually the angle that Second Temple literature—again, this tradition that exists around the time of the apostles. That’s not the way that they tend to look at it. They don’t tend to look at it as: “Oh, what should Abraham do? How faithful is he?”

Fr. Stephen: Abraham is in a moral dilemma.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how faithful is he going to be or not?

Fr. Stephen: Abraham’s trolley problem. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s not that that’s not an interesting question. It is. It’s not like we shouldn’t ever talk about that or whatever, but that the main focus is actually on Isaac: What is Isaac doing? Isaac as the main character in this scene.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that the idea was to view the event from the perspective of Isaac, and when you do that there’s several things that sort of emerge, and the first and foremost, the one that’s the constant source of meditations, not only in sort of Second Temple literature proper but in prayers from that period that we have preserved, this becomes a major, major emphasis and a way of interpreting other parts of the Old Testament, that they focus on Isaac’s silence. That most of us, if someone was trying to tie us up and kill us would be kicking and screaming. [Laughter] And even if it was our dad.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, reasonable behavior. But, yeah, he’s quiet. He asks a question, but that’s pretty much it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, on the way, he asks, “Hey, where are we going to get…?” You know. But then, yeah, that silence… We talked about in the sacrifice episode that we just answered a couple callers about—we talked about how there was… we find this tradition in sacrifices where the animal sort of voluntarily offers itself, and that’s how this silence—this silence of Isaac was understood in this context, so that his silence becomes emblematic of obedience and self-offering. And that is so firmly embedded by the Second Temple period as an understanding of Isaac that the most common interpretation of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, all of those passages—“as a sheep led to the slaughter,” “as he opened not his mouth”—all of those texts, all those texts about the Suffering Servant, were interpreted as being initially about Isaac, sort of immediately as meditations on Isaac.

And there were prayers that we have preserved, as I mentioned, that are prayed sort of from the perspective of Isaac, from the Second Temple period. And those prayers are interesting, because they’re hugely controversial, because a whole bunch of people want to insist that they have to be Christian.

Fr. Andrew: Ha, but they’re actually before Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because the way they portray Isaac is so close to early Christian devotion, meditation on the death of Christ, and that Isaiah imagery, that they’re like: “There’s no way!” But this is being done with Isaac.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so where— I mean, out of curiosity, what texts would you look in to find those prayers?

Fr. Stephen: Well, you’d have to find a very obscure book called Prayers Supposed to Be Jewish published by the Society of Biblical Literature.

Fr. Andrew: Wow, what a title! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: They’re supposed to be Jewish.

Fr. Stephen: They’re sort of compiling the whole argument back and forth, about…

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So, Isaac—and, yes, it is also true that those texts in Isaiah were understood to be talking about the Messiah. And this is true not only pre-Christian but even in Rabbinic Judaism. You can go all the way to Maimonides in the medieval period [who] was still saying that that was about the Messiah. People may be familiar with the more modern Rabbinic Jewish interpretation that that’s talking about Israel, not talking about the Messiah, because sort of all messianism has been purged from Rabbinic Judaism or close to it by this point, in reaction to Christianity, but even in the Middle Ages it was about the Messiah.

But in all of those cases, they’re still going through Isaac to get there, so understanding that it’s the Messiah, they were understanding that this was talking about Isaac, but that Isaac is an image of the Messiah who is coming. And even with the people of Israel, they’re really, in that modern interpretation, they’re really going through Isaac as representative of Israel, as the forefather, the patriarch of Israel, being the singular person in that text.

Fr. Andrew: The seed.

Fr. Stephen: So it’s kind of unavoidable, it’s so embedded in Old Testament interpretation and understanding.

So then the other big thing that gets talked about here is certain folks—they know who they are—get a little giddy about this story because of the ram in the thicket.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, because…

Fr. Stephen: They think, “Oh, this is where I can get my substitutionary atonement back in here!”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and for those who don’t… who maybe not know what that means, substitutionary atonement, it’s the idea that comes largely out of the Reformation that mankind, because of its sins, deserves punishment from God, so you’re born with a sentence of punishment, and then Jesus steps in and says, “No, wait. I’ll take that punishment. Give it to me instead,” because God has to punish sin; God has to be satisfied because of sin, and so this is called substitutionary atonement. So then people look at this sacrifice of Isaac scene, and they see the ram that’s in the thicket, and they think, “Okay, that ram: that’s Jesus, who’s going to step in and take this so that Isaac doesn’t have to.”

Although, I mean, there’s all kinds of issues other than what we’re just going to talk about. Okay, just on its face it’s like: What did Isaac do that he has to be sacrificed as the response?

Fr. Stephen: Where does it say that Isaac is a sin-offering?

Fr. Andrew: Right, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: In this instance, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Which goes completely against the whole system, the way— You know, you don’t have the whole Torah yet, but… yeah. So, yeah, just internally it has problems, but actually, there’s way more going on here.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there is something positive going on with the ram that you miss if you try and go in that direction. Just to save you some “Um, actually…“s, what you were describing coming out of the Reformation is actually penal substitutionary atonement.

Fr. Andrew: Penal, excuse me, yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Which evolves out of satisfaction theory which has some of those elements that’s usually associated with Anselm, five centuries earlier, but this Western development of the idea of substitutionary atonement, of which penal substitution is a species.

Fr. Andrew: A particular case, yeah, because we don’t have to go into it, but the idea that Christ is a substitute is a thing in patristic commentary—

Fr. Stephen: But not in this instance.

Fr. Andrew: —but not a substitute in this way. Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So what’s going on with the ram? And the problem is that the presupposition here is that you’re coming to it with a presupposition that something has to die and that’s the reason that the ram is there. Isaac has to die: well, if Isaac isn’t going to die, then there’s some necessity here, and therefore if Isaac doesn’t die, something else has to die in his place. We must have blood for the blood-god, right?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Stephen: And that presupposition is nowhere in Genesis up to this point. We’ll just leave it at that. There’s nowhere where a reader of Genesis would get that without completely importing it. So where we get at the importance of what’s going on here with the ram and why the ram is being offered as a thank-offering is the location where this takes place. So the location where this takes place, the mountain to the top of which, the high place to which Abraham takes Isaac to sacrifice him, is Mount Moriah, Mount More-ee-ah, and that name literally means the place where Yahweh appears.

Fr. Andrew: Right, you’ve got that -iah there on the end.

Fr. Stephen: The place where Yahweh appears. So it is not coincidental that this mountain is the mountain where the Temple is later built, because the Temple is the place where Yahweh appears on the Day of Atonement.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: We’ve talked about that at length. That’s why they had to offer the cloud of incense. And so this isn’t just the place where Abraham offers this ram this one time; this is the place where all of the future rams, all of the future bulls, all of the future things that are legitimate offerings to Yahweh as he has said he desired to be worshiped—this is the place where all are going to be offered in the future. So there is a kind of substitution here, in the sense that all of these animal sacrifices that are going to take place on this mountain are a substitute for the sacrifice of the unique Son.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so the substitute actually goes the other way than the penal substitution theory. So in a very clear sense, then, the rams begin to be offered at this point until such time as the monogenes, the unique Son—Isaac in his fulfillment, who is Jesus Christ—will be offered.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is why, very quickly—very quickly, almost immediately—in the New Testament period among the apostles, they stopped sacrificing animals. That’s how they understand that as being fulfilled. The animal sacrifices there were, the sin-offerings there were a fill-in, a substitute for the real thing, a shadow of the real thing, an image of the real thing. And so when the real thing came, you don’t need those pointers any more. But the first pointer is Isaac himself, that it’s going to be the unique Son who’s going to fulfill it.

And there’s one place in the New Testament where there is a sort of meditation on the story of Isaac in general and his relation to the promises and especially this episode of the sacrifice of Isaac directly, a direct, clear reference.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this basically summarizes together, in one fairly short passage, everything we’ve just said for this whole episode. Yeah, so this in Hebrews 11:16-19. This is what St. Paul writes there.

But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one, therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. By faith, Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your seed be named.” He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.

So what’s going on here?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well first at the beginning there, in what’s Hebrews 11:16, there’s a pointer to this idea we were talking about in the last act, in our second half, about the idea that the physical land was this sign of the fulfillment of the rest of the promises to Abraham. But then it immediately goes to the fact that those greater promises are going to be received through Isaac, and specifically now it focuses on this offering of his only son through whom his seed would be named. So this is the singular son; this is whom the promises are going to come through—and Abraham’s being told to now kill him. So there’s this obvious, immediate tension there. So that tension is resolved here in St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews by pointing out that Abraham had in his head that God was able to raise him from the dead, which happens by way of a figure, by way of a symbol, by way of a sign.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s worth pointing out here, too, by the way, that the word monogenes is used here to refer to Isaac. In this passage, St. Paul uses that word, but we couldn’t understand that here… So here’s an example of where we can’t understand monogenes as meaning “only-begotten,” because Isaac is not Abraham’s only-begotten son. He’s got, in fact, an older brother, Ishmael.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, he’s Sarah’s only-begotten, but not Abraham’s.

Fr. Andrew: But not Abraham’s, yeah. So the only way to read it in this passage is as being the unique son, the one who is uniquely his son in this particular way.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so what here Abraham is said to understand is that he is going to receive those promises through the death and resurrection of the unique son, and what happens on that mountain with Isaac is the figure—the symbol, the sign—of that reality, which then manifests itself in our human experience in the Person of Jesus Christ, in his death, resurrection, ascension, and of course his incarnation as a whole. That is the means by which those spiritual promises that… And Hebrews is saying Abraham realized that.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Abraham realized that through the sign.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s really cool! Sorry, I just have to say that. I mean, I’ve read this passage my whole life, but the idea that this has something to do with Christ—sure, okay, there was that God was able to raise him from the dead. He even says that, but just to hear it all brought together like that is just really, really beautiful. Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and so that kind of manifests itself in various other ways in various other parts of the New Testament. So when Christ is talking to the Sadducees about the resurrection, and they of course do not believe in it—they do not believe the anastasis is going to happen—what does he say to prove it? He says God says he’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, meaning he’s saying Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have already participated in the resurrection, what St. John will call the first resurrection, meaning Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had received those promises at the spiritual level. They had received that theosis, that deification, and were now… And this is why you usually see Abraham depicted in paradise in iconography.

And then—this is mostly a plug here, as we draw our third half to a close: you should read 4 Ezra, everyone—including Fr. Andrew.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Yeah, I know.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] If you’re a Slav, it’s in your Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is one of the little differences of the Old Testament canon within the Orthodox Church. The Russian canon has 4 Ezra, but the Greek canon does not.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And now someone will try to “Um, actually” us by saying it’s in an appendix, and I’ll say, “Okay, what’s the canonical status of an appendix?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: It’s in there. It’s in the book. That’s all I’m saying. And that means you should probably read it.

Fr. Andrew: So why read 4 Ezra with regards to all of this?

Fr. Stephen: In this context, one of the… The book is a series of visions that Ezra has—Ezra the scribe, like the book of Ezra, or 1 and 2 Esdras, depending on how you number those. Anyway. That Ezra has. And one of them is this vision of the bridegroom that’s sort of a parable of the bridegroom. All of the bridegroom imagery that you see in the New Testament is not taken from 4 Ezra—4 Ezra was written too late for that—but it’s sort of drawing on the same wells; it’s drawing on the same traditions, so it gives us a glimpse of this. And in it the bridegroom comes to consummate his marriage, and then, as he crosses the threshold to enter into the bridal chamber and consummate his marriage, he dies. And then there is this mourning that takes place by the people for the bridegroom who died right before he could consummate his marriage. And not only are a number of the parables regarding bridegrooms and Christ’s portrayal as a bridegroom in the New Testament drawing on some of these same traditions, but especially that mourning for the bridegroom, once you’re familiar with it, a lot of what goes on in Bridegroom Matins—and the fact that it’s called Bridegroom Matins—at the beginning of Holy Week starts to make a lot of sense, because this is that arc that we see in the story of Isaac as a person, when he gets his own story in Genesis: his death and resurrection and then the consummation of his marriage, this sort of idealized, iconographic marriage, which of course everyone would say, “Oh, well, that marriage points to Christ and the Church.” Exactly.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Exactly, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: So does the death and resurrection of Christ! And then the consummation of his marriage to the Church.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s cool. All right, well, just to make some final comments, one of the things that’s most valuable to me about everything that we just discussed is one of the kind of meta points of this podcast, which is to try as much as possible to give people a framework within which to understand the whole Scripture. And then, if you understand Scripture, you understand Christianity, truly—if you understand Scripture in the right way. And there’s multiple ways to do that. So one of the ways—the arc that we chose for this episode—is the arc of the story of Abraham. So you’ve got Abraham being called out of this civilization that is dominated by demons, and that he is given promises by God that his descendants would be like the stars, that they would also be numerous, that they would receive this land, that they would displace the dark powers: all of these promises given to Abraham, and then fulfilled through his seed, which sort of in the meantime is Isaac and then ultimately is Christ, whom then we see fulfilling what Isaac did, which is who symbolically dies and comes back to life and then is married. Christ truly dies, comes back to life, and then his marriage to the Church.

This is one of the big arcs, and you might ask the question, “Well, what’s the point in trying to understand the Scripture in this way?” Well, there’s a couple of things that I want to say. Number one, if you understand large arcs of Scripture—this is not the only one; there are multiple arcs that you can use to understand the whole Scriptures, but if you understand the large arcs, then actually it gives…it makes it easier to understand particular passages as you’re reading it. Again, we’re trying to point people towards reading the Scripture for themselves. And then it makes a lot more sense, because it’s easy to kind of get lost in the weeds of Scripture if you don’t have the plot, so to speak. Now, there’s several plots going on, so if you know particular ones then you can see it more clearly. But aside just from that sort of logistical advantage to being able to read the Bible better, understanding what Scripture says helps us to understand who Christ is and what he accomplished, and then also then what he expects from us. This is what the proclamation of the Gospel actually is.

So certainly we receive the Gospel in an initial way, and we believe it and choose to become faithful to God in response, but we need to be continuously re-evangelized. I need to re-receive the Gospel not just sort of over and over but more and more deeply, so that I can be more faithful, so that I can know who Christ is, what he accomplished, what he expects of me. And I think that the story of Abraham as continued then in Isaac and fulfilled in Christ is really a powerful, powerful way to receive the Gospel. Knowing this story, then, it’s also a powerful way to preach the Gospel to people. The whole Gospel message is contained within this arc that you see in Scripture. So this is all very practical. Yes, you don’t necessarily need to preach the Gospel by telling people about the fact that there’s three dynasties of Ur but really there’s only two—that’s not a critical detail! But, nonetheless, having this sense of where Abraham comes from and all the rest, that is a very powerful way of preaching the Gospel.

So that’s my primary take-away. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So we had a caller tonight asking about sacramental living, and I think what I want to kind of focus on for a minute is this relationship that we talked about between sign and prophecy, between sign and the thing signified, between the material and immediate sign and then the greater spiritual fulfillment, spiritual reality, because that’s the core of what “sacramental”—or, I guess, “mysterious” would be our super Orthodox version of it—what that is getting at, that there is a complete union between the sign and the thing signified, between the two. But it’s very uncommon for us as modern Western people to keep that union in our brain for very long, and there’s lots of places where this can go sideways. So on one side you have the more materialist side, where the focus shifts almost entirely to the material side, until sometimes that’s sort of functionally, even if you don’t come out and say that you’re denying the reality of the spiritual, functionally, you’re only interacting on the material side.

This takes lots of forms. We already took a mean-spirited shot at our poor Dispensationalist friends earlier, for focusing on the sign part, the physical land part of Abraham’s promises rather than on the spiritual side, but this is far more extensive than that in religious life in North America. The idea that Christianity gets reduced to a prosperity gospel, or even among people who are more mainstream in terms of their theology, on the conservative side, it’s very easy for Christianity to get reduced to a kind of private or personal morality: “I don’t do certain things because I’m a Christian, and I do a couple of things, but not many—like go to church. But I don’t do a bunch of things. My personal morality, that’s what I’m doing to be a Christian.” And then on the more liberal side, it gets reduced to a kind of more corporate or more community reality, a more social justice kind of morality, where we’re doing good in the world and that’s what it means to be a Christian, is to go and do these good things in this world and that’s it.

Or you can go in the other direction, where you begin to ignore the material, and this may be a temptation that maybe we experience more as Orthodox Christians, where we want to talk about theosis all the time and prayer rules and contemplative prayer and hesychasm, and where we shift away the material; we shift away the sign completely. We ignore the sign and want to go just straight to the spiritual, as if we can just sort of dive into it and comprehend it without the material sign, or participate in it without the material sign. So then we sort of don’t care about the fact that we drove past five homeless people on the way to church because we’re going to go to church and celebrate the Liturgy and have these great feelings of the presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit and we’re going to receive the sacraments—not that any of those things are bad; it’s just we’re ignoring a whole other field.

And the truth and the reality of Christianity is found in— so we said that sacramental level of realizing that those are the same thing. So when Christ went and fed people, when Christ went and healed people of physical illnessess—those same people were going to die of something else later—but when he healed the sick, he healed the paralyzed, he healed the disabled, he fed people: those were signs of the coming of the kingdom. Those were concrete actions and experiences that made the kingdom and made the Gospel and made who Christ was and his promises real to those people, just as the Gospel became real to Abraham as he actually stood on a mountain, ready to kill his son, but received him back alive.

So this is the place where we need to go when we start to, as modern people, as we’re prone to have doubts about the spiritual side: Is this spiritual stuff really true? And the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is fun to argue about online, but is it true? Are these things real? You will find they’re real when you start participating in the signs of their reality, when you start giving a cup of water to one of Christ’s little ones in his name—not that that is an end in itself, not that that is a good work that’s going to earn you salvation or something, but that is the place, when you show love for someone, that’s the place where you will experience Christ’s love, and it will become real to you. All of these things become real through those signs, and our behavior and actions in this world toward other people, at an individual level and at a community level, at a social level and privately, by ourselves, with our families, with our communities, with our church, out in public—this is where we have endless opportunities to actively participate in and see the reality of the spiritual through the physical and the material, in our own lives and in the lives of other people.

Fr. Andrew: All right, well, this was our anniversary episode. It’s been a whole year of Lord of Spirits. We now estimate that we now have about 12,000 regular listeners, which, I mean, that’s just amazing. We’re so grateful you’re here. Occasionally we get asked if we’re planning to wrap up the show soon, but actually we’ve got a pretty endless list of ideas, so: onward and upward. Excelsior.

Fr. Stephen: I am Jack “the King” Kirby in this analogy, and so I accept it, but I’m also here for… I mean, you may be here for the 12,000 regular listeners; I’m here for all the irregular ones.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That is our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during this live broadcast, we’d love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page. We do read everything, but we can’t respond to everything, and we do save some of what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific.

Fr. Andrew: And if you’re on Facebook, you can like our page and join our discussion group. Leave reviews and ratings everywhere, but, most importantly, share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it.

Fr. Stephen: Or hate-listen to it regularly. And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: And buy my new book! Arise, O God, and also Fr. Stephen’s book, Religion of the Apostles at store.ancientfaith.com. Thank you, good night, and God bless you.