Fr. Stephen De Young: We'll go ahead and get started, and when we get started in just a moment, we're picking up in Genesis 3. Nothing really eventful's going to happen here. [Laughter] But we don't have a lot to recap, because we're not that far into the Bible. And I won't belabor things too much. I always belabor things a little, but not too much.

I'm not going to go through our whole big long introduction to the Torah, introduction to Genesis, and all that again. Genesis 1, obviously, 1:1-2:1, we read the creation of the world, structured around seven days. Genesis 2, we read about the creation of humanity, first of man, then of woman. That really brings us to chapter three. Is that the quickest review ever?

Q1: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Because if I go any more into that, we'll have less time for chapter three, so let's just go ahead. Unless anybody has any leftover questions or comments or Christmas goodies they want to give me, we'll go ahead and get started in Genesis 3:1.

Now the serpent was more cunning than all the wild animals the Lord God made on the earth, and he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said you shall not eat from every tree of the garden?"

We'll start here. [Laughter] Because we've already got a bunch of things just in this one verse. The first thing we have to talk about is the serpent, because what we're not talking about here—this story is not— I know I've been referencing Rudyard Kipling a lot in the last couple of chapters, but this is not Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Story about "How the Snake Lost His Legs." So this is not: snakes used to have legs like lizards, until this happened, and one of them was bad and… This is also not the story of a talking snake. It's not like animals used to talk in paradise, and then they just lost that ability outside of animation.

The word here that we translate as "serpent" is originally the Hebrew word nachash. One of the things you can do in Hebrew— All Hebrew words have what are called triliteral roots. What that means is they're made up of three consonants. Originally, the vowels weren't written at all. Those vowels that get added, those were referred to as the vocalization of the word. And those vowels in a lot of cases—not all cases, but in a lot of cases—tell you what part of speech the word is—and Hebrew doesn't really have tenses; they have a thing called "tense," but it's confusing because it has nothing to do with time—but the way to interpret the word, if it's a verb or a noun. Sometimes there are letters that get added to those three—that three-consonant root. But sometimes there's not, and so sometimes there's this room for interpretation. And Hebrew authors who were writing without the vowels, knew that there was this room for interpretation, and so especially in Hebrew poetry you get a lot of wordplay that way, because you have a word which—well, if you have this it would mean this, and if that it would mean that, and so you can kind of refer to both by using that particular word and leaving it a little ambiguous.

And so nachash here, there are no—if you take the later vowel markings out—there are no consonantal markers, no consonants that mark what part of speech this is. So this word can mean different things. So if it's a noun—this is why they're translating it as "serpent"— If it's a noun, it refers to a serpent. If it is an adjective, then it refers to the clever or wise one. If it's a participle, meaning if it's a verb being used sort of as a noun, then it means the— literally the brazen one or the shining one, "brazen" as in bronze. So it has sort of all three of those included meanings there. And one of those is kind of bolstered by the way it's translated in the Orthodox Study Bible as kind of more cunning, and that word kind of meanings cunning or devious or slippery. I think— I forget which translation it is, but there's one English translation that has "subtle," which is an older meaning of the word "subtle"! It's not "he's the most subtle" as "he just hints at things," instead of blatant. But that kind of idea.

So why is that important? Well, this is hinting at that this creature is more than just, again, a snake, a talking snake. It is a serpentine being who is shining, glowing, brazen, and is also wise or clever or devious. So if we want to get helped out on who this is—because this is his introduction— He just shows up here, and he's not going to show up in expressly this form again. After we're done with Genesis 3, we're not going to have "the serpent" directly referring to this. We saw in Revelation that St. John actually makes a reference to it, but he doesn't appear as a character under this name.

But there are a couple of places—one in Ezekiel and one in Isaiah—where the figure that's going to become known as the devil is talked about. One is in Isaiah, the prophecy against the king of Tyre, which is divided into two pieces. There's a prophecy against the prince of Tyre, which is talking about the human king, and if you read that you can tell, and then it switches from the prince of Tyre to the king of Tyre, and in doing so it switches from the human king to sort of the spiritual power that stands behind him, which is Baal, and starts talking about Baal. And then in Ezekiel, there is another prophetic passage that does a similar thing.

And in Ezekiel it refers to this divine figure who is cast down out of heaven—we'll get to the casting down later in this chapter—who was cast out of heaven. It talks about him walking on the mountain of assembly, the mountain of Eden. We talked about Eden being on a mountain. So it talks about that figure being in Eden. And there he's referred to as a guardian cherub, which is cheruv. We talked about cheruvim or cherubim in Revelation, but just to repeat: "cherub" is not a little baby with wings; it's not a little fat baby selling you toilet paper or something, Angel Soft. [Laughter] Those are cupids from Roman paganism. But a cherub, a cheruv, was, if you've seen a Babylonian—what they called a lamassu. It looks kind of like a sphinx: it's got the lion body and the big wings, and then the human head with the ringlet beard. That is what a cherub is.

So that's a cherub. "Cherubim" is just plural; "-im" is the Hebrew plural ending. It literally means a living creature. That's why they get called "living creatures" in the English translations of Daniel and Ezekiel and Revelation. So that's what one is. When we get to the ark of the covenant, that's what's on the ark of the covenant. When we say that Christ in the liturgy is seated upon the cheruvim, that's what we mean, not a whole bunch of little babies.

But what a cheruv, what a cherub did in the Babylonian version, is they were a throne guardian for the divine throne of one of the gods. That's the place where we see them in both the Old and New Testaments. In the New Testament, we're talking mainly about Revelation, but they're surrounding the throne. God is enthroned upon them. If your question is: Why does God need these weird angelic beings with multiple heads and animal bodies to protect his throne, they're not protecting his throne from us; they're protecting us from his throne. They're keeping people away from the divine presence which would consume them. You get death by holiness if you get too close and you're not holy and pure.

So that's the Babylonian version. The Egyptian version of the same creature, the throne-guardian creature, were seraphim, literally. So the word "seraph" is a word that Hebrew borrowed from Egyptian. It's the Egyptian word for snake or serpent. They borrowed it, just the plural: put a Hebrew ending on it. "Seraph" in Hebrew, now that they've borrowed it, can have the same—a similar kind of range of meanings. One of those is the burning one, as a participle. And they're generally presented as winged serpents. So the burning being connected to serpents was likely connected to their venom. When we see them in Egypt, the winged part is the cobra hood. Now, in later Israelite stuff, like we have coins from the northern kingdom of Israel that have seraphim on them, and they're literally a snake with wings, like on its back. So that gets literalized later on in Old Testament history, but the Egyptian version is sort of a cobra with a hood, and the burning part is the bite, the venom.

So this is why, when you look at, say, King Tutankhamun's sarcophagus—this is probably the most, for us in the US, [well-known] image of that, he has a cobra on his forehead. This is why the pharaoh's headdress looks like a cobra's hood. This is the idea of that divine being, and of course they considered pharaoh to be a god, and so it was there protecting the throne of the god. So this is what— And it's interesting throughout the Torah and the Pentateuch, all five of these books, there's this mix of Mesopotamian and Egyptian imagery, which is sort of exactly what you would expect based on our introduction, if you have this first layer from the Israelites coming out of Egypt that then gets kind of translated into a later version of Hebrew with some edits and some updates; that's where the Mesopotamian influence comes in and you get both of these together.

That's the kind of creature we're talking about here. This is an angelic being. This is a shining being who is, at this point, in God's presence, which is what paradise is, as we talked about what Eden is: this is the place where God dwells, garden on a mountain. And so he's one of the other creatures there. Yes, sir.

Q2: So how related is this to the word that's used about the snakes that Moses has to put the bronze…?

Fr. Stephen: Same word.

Q2: It's the same word. So is it—? Are we supposed to have the same kind of idea of those being, like, shining ones?

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, that's not the word that's used for the snakes on the ground; it's the one that's used for the bronze one.

Q2: Oh, okay.

Q3: So this one isn't part of the animals who were named.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so I know we talked about this back in Revelation 12, but it bears repeating, because everybody has a huge dose of John Milton in their heads, that, at some point unrecorded in the Bible, before the world was created, before humans were created, that Satan and the devil, who are the same person or the same angel, led this rebellion, and the angels fought each other, and Satan lost, and "he'd rather rule in hell than serve in heaven," like Milton's romantic figure, and went down to hell. So he was already in hell at the time this is happening. The biggest problem is, as I mentioned, that's nowhere in the Bible. It's also nowhere in the Church Fathers. It's really nowhere until you get close to Milton. [Laughter]

As we talked about when we talked about Genesis 1, Church Fathers put the creation of the angelic beings on different days, usually the first day or the fourth day, and we talked about why those are connected and why those two. Well, I'll go back to— We talked about them a bunch when we were working our way through Revelation. That's St. Andrew of Caesarea who wrote the commentary on the book of Revelation in the sixth century that finally helped get Revelation accepted as canon in the Eastern churches. In that commentary, when he's talking about Revelation 12, he says, as I am wont to quote, "We must accept what all the Fathers say, which is that after the creation of the world, the devil fell through envy." We'll talk about that "fell through envy" part here as we go forward, but for now the "after the creation of the world" part. So St. Andrew in the sixth century is looking at all of the Christian interpreters that he has access to, which was a lot because Caesarea was a major Christian city, and going through these libraries of all the Christian commentary up to the sixth century, and he says, "This is what everybody says," not just "This is my preferred opinion"; it's: "This is what Christianity teaches thus far. So, yes, at this point, pause. We're about to read about it, coming up, and what it means.

The other big problem— I said the biggest problem is that it's not in the Bible or in the Fathers or anywhere. The other problem with Milton is that it doesn't make fundamental logical sense, because Milton's idea is that the devil was going to somehow depose God and make himself God. My question being: How? [Laughter] He's a creature. Like, if you wanted to do that, what would be step one? [Laughter] Uhhh, right? Because this isn't like Bruce Almighty or something. God is not just a being with super powers. He's God. There's not a way to make him not-God and make yourself God. This would be like one of my dogs deciding to make me a dog and himself a human. Like… good luck? [Laughter] How are you going to do that? So, yeah, it's just not a feasible even thing. But we'll talk more as we go forward about what's going on.

But so that's who this is, who's now talking to the woman.

Q1: Can I ask something?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, sir.

Q1: The mention of the wild animals sounds like, to us at least, that they're including the serpent among the wild animals, but there's something different from that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It doesn't say he's more cunning than the other...

Q1: So there's a distinction from the wild animals.

Fr. Stephen: From the other creatures, right. He's not like the animals whom we just saw Adam naming. He is a different kind of thing, like a bear would not have been able to talk Eve into eating the apple, because he can't talk for one thing. But he's a different kind of… So he's not in that category of the creatures that were paraded before Adam in the last chapter.

So now he comes and he speaks to the woman and says, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat from every tree of the garden?' " Notice already there's something a little odd there in how he phrases that, because, remember, the commandment was: "You may eat from every tree of the garden except this one." And so he comes— His response is: "Has he not— Has he said to you, 'You shall not eat from every tree of the garden?' " Well, the answer to that is no…, he didn't say, "You shall not eat from every tree…" [Laughter] Like, it's repositioning.

Also note, this is the first theological conversation. This is why you should not argue about theology on the internet; this is the beginning of that tradition. [Laughter] What I mean by that is this is the first time someone has had a conversation about God as an object, not God speaking to people or God speaking to a person and a person speaking back to God, but two creatures having a conversation about God, as if he's not there. This is— Even the way he begins this is problematic. There's already something going on here, some gamesmanship at work.

Verse two: "And the woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat the fruit from the trees of the garden, but from the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, "You shall not eat from it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die." ' " So she doesn't immediately fall for the trick question; she says, "This is what we were told." And actually it wasn't her. If you remember, that command was given to Adam before she existed. But you notice there's been an added bit, and we don't know whether Adam added this bit or she added this bit, maybe Adam when he told her, but the "Don't even touch it!" part. "Don't even go near it! You know what, don't even go near it! Don't mess with that tree." [Laughter]

But this is— This is something that becomes a major part of Jewish interpretation of the commandments, already by the time you get to the New Testament, this idea of building a fence around the commandments. We've talked about this before, back when we were talking about the Pharisees, because the idea was: You know what, we don't want to sin; we don't want to break the commandments. So we build a fence a few feet away from actually breaking it, and that way we don't even get close to breaking it. Can't take the name of the Lord in vain if you never ever say "Yahweh." [Laughter] If you just never say the name, then you can't take it in vain. Not supposed to work on the sabbath. What does that mean? Well, you can only walk this far, you can only… And so we do all these things to stay away from breaking the commandments. So, again, we have a theological discussion going on here. It's like: "We don't go anywhere near it! We don't have anything to do with that tree."

Q1: But he says they will die, and cursed be the— There hasn't been any death at all yet; nothing has died. What—? Would she understand what he means?

Fr. Stephen: Ah, no, and we'll get to that later on in chapter three, because there's something directly addressed at that. Because, yes, this is a— "You will die" is a hypothetical thing at this point. We'll get into exactly what that means. But so she accurately—a little over-accurately—describes this as "this is what God said."

Verse four: "Then the serpent said to the woman, 'You shall not die by death.' " Remember that's the— We talked about that when God first gave the commandment, it translated it the same way, that "die by death" thing. It always reminds me of this old movie, Murder by Death. [Laughter]

Q1: Oh, yes.

Fr. Stephen: Have you seen it?

Q1: No, I haven't seen it, but I've heard of it.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, okay. It's sort of a parody of Agatha Christie mysteries. But that's a way of— There's a Hebrew construction called an infinitive absolute, where you have a verb and then you put the infinitive of the verb right after it. So if you translated that really literally, it's like "dying you will die," and that's a way of being sort of super emphatic. The King James, I think, does that as "you will surely die." This is— "Die by death," I just find… As opposed to dying by what? [Laughter] What other thing can you die by? But that's the idea there: This will certainly happen.

Verse four here, in his rejoinder, the serpent now directly contradicts what God told them. He said you will; the serpent says you will not.

Verse five: " 'For God knows in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.' " Again, this is some of that subtleness, because in a certain way that second part of the statement is true, if you understand what "gods" here is referring to.

What is "gods" here referring to? So this is— And we're in Genesis, so we might as well have this discussion now. "Gods" is used in the plural all over the place in the Old Testament. It's actually more common in the Greek than in the Hebrew, and the later you go in Jewish history, the more common it becomes to use "gods" in the plural. Why is that important, that it becomes more common? Because a lot of our friends, led by our 18th- and 19th-century German friends, want to create this sort of evolutionary thing where the Israelites started out as polytheists and then at some point later became monotheists, so they started out believing and worshiping a whole bunch of gods and then later on they only believed that one god existed. Neither of those are true.

The idea of monotheism, meaning there's only one God that exists, is an idea that begins in the late 16th and early 17th century. You literally don't find the term before that. And there's no reason why not, because monos and theos are both Greek words. But the Church Fathers, writing in Greek, never talk about monotheism. Never use the word "monotheism"—and they do use the word "polytheism." They call the pagans polytheists—"You believe in many gods"—but they don't call themselves monotheists. The word they use for themselves is monarchia, meaning one arche, one first principle, one God who is unlike any other being which is called god. And they're getting that from St. Paul, that direct language. Remember, St. Paul said, "There are many things that are called gods and indeed there are many gods and many lords, but for us there is one God the Father and the one Lord Jesus Christ."

So the term "god," lowercase-g in the plural, is all over the place. It's all over the place in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Melchizedek Scroll in the Dead Sea Scrolls talks about "in the end times, Melchizedek will come with all the righteous gods," and you're going: "Wait, I thought these people were Jewish." [Laughter] And these are second-century BC Jewish people, not some early polytheist Jewish people. Because they're using that word in a different way than the way we use it.

That word got used, that plural word got used, just to refer to— Like, sometimes it translated "divine beings." Usually it gets covered up in English translations. They don't like using it because people freak out when they see "gods." [Laughter] But that's used just to refer to spiritual beings, divine beings, what we would call angels, demons, etc.—just get called gods, and they're totally fine with that.

They have various ways of indicating that God—Yahweh the God of Israel—is different than those other spiritual beings, number one being he created them, so he's eternal; they're not, all of these other differences. One of the main linguistic ways in Greek is they put the article before "God." So you would literally translate it as "the God." That's a handy way, like the way we use the capital-G as opposed to the lowercase-g, they used the article as opposed to without the article. But this is super common and nothing to freak out about.

So what the serpent is saying here is not, "If you eat the apple, you will turn into God"; he's saying, "If you eat the apple, you will be like these divine beings," like the serpent. "You'll be like one of us instead of one of you. And God doesn't want that to happen. That's why he told you not to do it." So that's the lie he's telling, which is a half-truth, because what we're going to see is that when they do eat from it, they do in a certain way become like those beings, because the serpent already knows good and evil. He's more about the evil right now than the good, but he knows good and evil, and Adam and Eve don't. As we talked about, that's a mark of their innocence. This is not talking about them being perfect; it's talking about them being innocent like children, because knowing good and evil— We just heard from Isaiah, in the Christmas services, in the prophecy, that a virgin would bear a child. It said, "Before he is old enough to know good and evil, this will happen." That means coming to maturity.

What the devil is offering here is: "God created you. He's given you these commandments for you to grow and come to maturity. Here's the shortcut. That's why he doesn't want you to eat from it. It's not that it's dangerous for you to eat from it before you're ready, before you are mature; it's that he doesn't want you to do this adult thing as a kid. He doesn't want you…" And we're going to see, this is going to be a pattern, especially here in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, but even going forward, of how the devil—demonic beings, Satan—how they work, is offering kinds of knowledge, kinds of things to humanity before they're ready for it, knowing that humans will use it in destructive ways, knowing that it'll be destructive.

Verse six: "So when the woman saw the tree was good for food, was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree beautiful to contemplate"—I like that translation, too—"she took its fruit and ate. She also gave it to her husband with her, and he ate." So a couple of things here. First, upon hearing this, she doesn't say anything to God. Again, this whole conversation is happening as if God's off somewhere and doesn't hear or see what's going on. She doesn't ask God for clarification; she just kind of looks at the tree. The tree looks good, the fruit looks good, it seems right in her own eyes—so she goes ahead and does it. And then gives it to Adam who's with her. What does this mean? Adam's been standing there the whole time.

Q2: He's like: "Let's see what happens."

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] He's been standing there the whole time! This whole conversation! This isn't like serpent shows up while she's all by herself and tricks her. He's standing right there, letting this all unfold.

Q2: "She didn't die, so I can eat it."

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. "Let's watch her eat it and see what happens!" So what's the clear problem here? He should've shut this down at some point!

Q1: He's already complicit.

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Part of why he's there is to tend the garden, to protect this sacred space in which he's been put. As we talked about, the creation of the world followed this pattern of the creation of a temple in the Ancient Near East. Adam's there as this priest. Well, what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to protect it. You should've driven the serpent out of there! Or at least said something to God, like: "Hey, what's up with this guy?" [Laughter] But not only does he not do that, at least when his wife doesn't instantly drop dead, he decides to disobey, too, and just follows her lead, like: "Oh, okay!"

"Then the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings." Remember when they were created, we talked about how "they were naked and they were not ashamed," it said, and we talked about how that's more of that innocence imagery of children. It's okay for little kids up to a certain age to run around naked; then they reach a certain age and that stops, and that's appropriate. So the idea that they were just sort of walking around naked and unashamed meant that they were still in this state of innocence. Well, they eat from the tree—innocence gone. And once innocence is gone, then shame comes. They go and they cover themselves.

Have you ever noticed in kids' books in the story of Adam and Eve, before this, they're always standing behind these bushes that have branches in convenient places? But anyway. Now we don't need those any more, because we have the sewn-together fig leaves. So they have to cover themselves. So that's the immediate effect, is this loss of innocence, this loss of purity. They've leapfrogged, but in the wrong way. They already knew good, because, remember, as God was creating, everything he finished he said— he called it "good," everything except Adam until his wife was made. Remember, he said it's not good that man should be alone on the earth. But then it was good afterwards! That situation was dealt with.

So now what they've gotten from eating of the tree is the knowledge of evil; that's what they've gained: a knowledge of something other than the good. "Knowledge" here is not just like data, like: "Oh, you mean it's possible to disobey God?" because they just did, clearly. [Laughter] There was that concept. It's not just raw data. The word, yada, "to know," in Hebrew, is the word that's going to be used at the end of this chapter to say, "Adam knew his wife, and she brought forth a son." So this is not… I remember way back when were talking about Romans. When we were going through Romans, I talked about the difference between "knowledge" and "knowledge about."

There is information that old friends of my wife know about my wife that I don't know. Her doctor has data in the chart, in the file, about my wife that I don't know. But none of those folks know my wife the way I know my wife. There's a difference between knowing someone or something and knowing about it.

Eating of the tree— And that's why it's eating from a tree. It is not "knowledge about." It's not that they gained some theoretical knowledge about what evil might be in their brain; it's they came to know evil. The ancient understanding of eating is you eat something, it becomes part of you. It becomes part of your body. So they have taken evil into themselves now. It's not a loss of innocence in the sense of they lost their naivete; it's loss of innocence as in they now have… They didn't lose the principle of good within them, but they now have this principle of evil within them that's become a part of them also.

Verse eight: "Then they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden that afternoon, and Adam and his wife hid themselves within the tree in the middle of the garden from the presence of the Lord God." And that's a pretty literal translation. Yahweh, who is God, capital-G God, is walking in the garden. That's how it's described. And in the Hebrew it says that he comes walking "in the heat of the day."

Q1: It's "the cool of the day" here.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which is bizarre. [Laughter] Well, what it literally says— Okay, it's NIV. What are you going to do? What it literally says in Hebrew is, Ruah ha yom, which means the spirit of the day. So "the heat of the day" is treating the word "spirit" there as referring to, like, a hot wind, because the word "spirit" can also mean "wind." And that's where they're getting "heat of the day." I guess NIV translators thought that meant "breeze," I don't know! I don't know where they get "cool of the day." But the fact that it's the word "spirit" is also kind of important in the sense of the Spirit and the presence of God.

The fact that it's ha yom is also interesting, that it's the day. We've talked about, later on, in the Hebrew Bible in the Old Testament, when "the day" is referred to, it's the day of Yahweh, the day of the Lord. That's what "the day" means, and that usage gets carried over into the New Testament, where there are passages that refer to "the day" or "that day," and it's referring to the day of the Lord. What is the day of the Lord? It's the day of judgment. It's the day of visitation; that's another thing it's called in the Old Testament. That's the day where Yahweh comes and things get sorted out. We've talked about how judgment is things being put back in order. Yahweh visiting his people is not Grandpa visiting for tea and scones; it's "Wait till your dad gets home!" Some stuff's going to get sorted out.

When it says that he comes in the spirit of the day, after what's just happened, that's the resonance. He's coming. He's now going to have to— Injustice has just happened. Things are out of whack. Things aren't good any more in his creation, and so now some things are going to have to be sorted out.

But also notice, he comes walking and they hear it. Mark something: This is the first of many places we're going to see in the Torah, in the Pentateuch, where God has a body, and he does things like walking and eating.

Q1: And it says they heard the voice of the Lord: is that like the word of the Lord?

Fr. Stephen: Enh, it's a weird… Yeah, I think that's where they're getting that. I think the Greek translation pulled that from the Aramaic. Let me explain that. [Laughter] So there are all these places— There's this tension in the Torah, in the Pentateuch, where on one hand it repeatedly gets said no one can see God and live, and on the other hand there are all these people who see God and live. [Laughter] So it's a certain kind of tension, right?

In Exodus 33, in the same chapter—I forget how many verses; it's nine or ten verses apart, I think—we're told that Moses spoke to God frequently, face to face, on Mount Sinai, and then we're told— He asked to see God's glory, and God says, "You can't see me and live." Tension. And one of the ways that got worked out is that in the Aramaic, what's usually referred to as the targums—not all targums are Aramaic, but the Aramaic targums are the most common ones—they're translations, but they're loose translations— They're like The Message. [Laughter]—of the Hebrew Bible, or the amplified Hebrew Bible. There's some more…

But what they did to try to handle that issue is they took the Aramaic word, memra, which means "word," and wherever God was walking, eating, had hands—any of these things—they added the word memra. So instead of just saying, "Moses spoke to Yahweh face-to-face," it was: "Moses spoke to Memra Yahweh face-to-face," the Word of Yahweh face-to-face.

And that idea is part of the general view in what's called Second Temple Judaism, right before the New Testament, that there is this intermediary figure between Yahweh who cannot be seen and creatures, who is often just identified as Yahweh, just identified as God, but can be seen. And that happens in different ways. But so the Word of Yahweh, the Memra Yahweh in Aramaic, the Debar Yahweh in Hebrew, becomes one of the names for that figure. And—spoilers—Christians quickly ball all of those figures together and say that's Jesus. And when I say "very quickly," St. Justin Martyr does that, in the middle of the second century. He has just this list, and he says that Christ appeared in the Old Testament as: the Angel of the Lord, the Word of the Lord—that just lists all of them and is like: That's all him.

Q1: Is this behind the Prologue of John's gospel?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that's specifically— The memra part is behind the Prologue of St. John's gospel when he talks about "in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God." This is like a Jewish thing. His original audience would have known what he was talking about. "The Word became flesh." They would have been like: "Okay, you are identifying Jesus of Nazareth as this figure." From a Christian perspective, again, starting in the second century, it is completely appropriate to read this as saying, "Christ came walking in the garden," or God the Son or the second Person of the Trinity, however you want to identify him at this point—that's who this is.

And that's not disconnected from that element of judgment and the day, because what does Christ say in St. John's gospel? "Even the Father judges no one. All judgment has been given to the Son." He doesn't say "from now on." [Laughter] From the beginning. And so they go— When they hear him coming, rather than greeting him, they go and hide. [Laughter]