Fr. Stephen: Verse 5: “To which of the angels did He ever say: ‘You are My Son, today I have begotten You’?” That’s a quote from Psalm 2. And Psalm 2 was one of the psalms that was used at the enthronement and crowning of the king of Israel. And that was the announcement: “You are my son, today I have begotten you.” Why? Well, the king of Israel in the Old Testament was seen to be the Son of God in a certain sense. What’s going on in this section we’re starting here, which is going to go on for a while, is, we’re disambiguating—to use a nice, modern internet term—we’re disambiguating “son of God.” Because the word “son of God” or “sons of God” is used a whole bunch of different ways in the Old Testament. So, “sons of God” is used to refer to a particular high rank of angels at several points.

So, you can see already, as we start this section, the transition, this is disambiguating: “When I say this is the Son, when we’re talking about Christ as the Son of God, we’re not saying he’s part of that high rank of angels.” We’ve got to disambiguate that. He’s the Son in a different sense than they’re sons of God. And now, here’s another one: the king of Israel is called the son of God in a sense. And, yes, he is the Christ, he is the Messiah, but he’s also more than that. He is the Son of God in a way that David wasn’t. That David pointed to but wasn’t himself.

So, the king was supposed to be the son of God in the sense of being God’s image on earth. Adam, in, I believe it’s St. Luke’s genealogy rather than St. Matthew’s—I’m pretty sure I’m right—is referred to as the son of God in the genealogy of Christ by St. Luke, for the same reason. He’s made in the image of God. So, this is basic, the Son is the image of the Father, that’s not just like, normally, through what we understand as genetics, your kid kind of looks like you. That’s true, but that’s – but it goes beyond that. It goes beyond that. It’s not just your physical appearance that you pick up, that a son picks up from his father. He learns all kinds of things from his father and picks up all kinds of attributes and character traits and things that are modeled to him, both through nature and through nurture.

And that also was seen to establish—it’s not just image in that physical sense—also established an ongoing relationship, so that a son can, by the way he lives his life and what he does, bring honor to his father, or dishonor to his father. This is what’s behind “honor your father and your mother” in the ten commandments. It’s not, “Do whatever your parents tell you”; even though that’s how parents always interpret that commandment, that’s not actually what it means. What it means is that you live your life in a way that brings honor to your father and your mother, which sometimes, if your father and your mother are behaving in sinful ways, means not doing what they tell you to do. Being better than they’ve taught you to be and want you to be. So that people see what the child is doing, and they say, like was said to Christ, “Blessed is the womb that bore you,” to bring honor to them.

And so, there’s this relationship – and that’s an unbreakable relationship. Even if the father disowns his son, then that itself will be a public scandal. That relationship is always there, de facto. And so, that’s a big part of how the image of God is understood in the Old Testament. So, Adam wasn’t just – when it says Adam’s made in the image of God, it doesn’t mean just that he physically resembled God; it means that he was called to image God in the world. And so, the king is proclaimed to be the son of God because he is called to do the same thing. The king of Israel is called—and the kings of Judah, later, also—is called to bring about God’s justice in the world, to show the compassion of God in the world, to show the leadership of God in the world, to teach the commandments of God, to shape and guide and lead the nation in the way God would have them go, and always to conduct himself in a way that brings honor to God, not just to himself, and definitely never to behave in a way that would bring dishonor to the God of Israel.

So, the king was the image of God in that sense and is the son of God in that sense, so that’s why this was used when he’s being crowned as king; this is a reminder: you are now God’s son. This is a statement of responsibility. It’s not just, like, “Hey, you got adopted, and he’s got a really cool house!” It’s, “You’ve been adopted, so now you have this high responsibility.” So, it’s being cited here in terms of disambiguating from the angels, because none of the angels were told that. That’s not the role any of the angels had. Certain humans have had it, but angels haven’t.

“And again: ‘I will be to Him a Father, and He shall be to Me a Son’?” That quote is from Second Samuel, and that’s God speaking through Nathan the prophet to David about his descendant – or descendants. The word “seed” in Hebrew, “zara”, which usually gets translated, “descendant” or “descendants” in English, is, in Hebrew, a collective noun like “deer” or “fish.” So, you could say, “There are three deer in my yard,” or you could say, “There’s one deer in my yard.” “I own twelve fish”; “I own one fish.” “Zara” is the same way.

And the Hebrew frequently plays with that – plays with that in terms of the promises to Abraham: sometimes it’s clearly plural; sometimes it’s pretty clearly singular. And the same thing with David. And they understood this. This is why they were looking for a Messiah. So, on one hand, God’s making a promise to David and his descendants, the kings of Judah who would come after him, but he’s also making a promise about a very particular descendant, the Messiah, the Anointed One, the King who’s going to come out of that line down the road. So, both of these quotes here have to do with the Davidic king in general and the Messiah in particular.

So, the point here is that what makes Christ as Son of God different from the angelic sons of God is that he’s also a human king, which none of the angels are, so he’s not an angel. Because angels aren’t humans. But we’ve already been told, essentially, that he’s God. So, again, this whole idea that Christ is divine and human is not something somebody came up with in the second or third or fourth or fifth century; it’s right here in the first, what, six verses of Hebrews. God created all the ages through him, for him, all this, and then, “Oh, look, here’s how he’s different from the angelic sons of God: he’s also a human king descended from David.”

And remember, we’re still within this frame of understanding Psalm 110/109 verse 1: “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” Remember the question Christ asked the scribes about that verse. Christ quoted it himself, and he said, “If the Messiah is David’s son, why does he call him his lord?” Because the father’s greater than the son; we’ve just been talking about that. So, why would David call his descendant his lord? So, what we’re reading here is directly related to that question. Because the Messiah isn’t just a human descendant; that’s what Christ was pointing to and that’s what we’re seeing getting elaborated here.

Verse 6: “But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says: ‘Let all the angels of God worship Him.’ ” How far do we want to go down this rabbit trail? So, this is a quote from Deuteronomy chapter 32. Deuteronomy chapter 32 is at least one of, if not the, oldest piece of the Old Testament – in unaltered form. There may be a bunch of other things in the Torah that are as old, but they’ve been edited and updated since, and translated. The only other thing that vies with Deuteronomy 32 for age in the Torah is Exodus 15, the song of the sea, after they cross the Red Sea.

Why do I say that? Well, because, frankly, the Hebrew is almost impossible to translate. Because it’s not really Hebrew. It’s basically Paleo-Hebrew; it’s something older than Hebrew. It’s like a dialect of Old Canaanite. And so, I promise I won’t go too far down this rabbit trail because we’ve talked about it before a bunch of times, but if we say Moses wrote the Torah, and what we mean is the Torah as we have it today, that’s not technically correct. This is why traditional scholars today, conservative scholars today, don’t talk about the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, or the Torah; they talk about the Mosaic origin of the Torah. Because the language that the oldest form of the Torah we have today is written in didn’t exist when Moses was alive.

So, Moses wrote some stuff, and that stuff becomes the Torah as we have it now, but it gets translated; it gets edited; it gets updated, and there are places where those updates are obvious. Like, it’ll name a city and it’ll say, “which used to be called this,” and that kind of thing, where somebody has come in, and the language has been updated. And this shouldn’t give us the heebie-jeebies because consider that, in the Orthodox Church, where we’ve pretty much always accepted the Greek translation that was made in the third century B.C. as being equally authoritative as any of the Hebrew versions we have – so if a third century translation is fine, nobody thinks Moses wrote in Greek, so it shouldn’t bother us so much that the Hebrew is also basically a translation.

But texts like Deuteronomy 32 and Exodus 15 have not been translated or updated. They’re still in this kind of archaic, Paleo-Hebrew thing. And so, you get lots of weird translations. Those are probably the texts where, if you look them up—you can do this online now if you go to Bible Gateway or something, or Bible Hub—and pull up, like, twelve different translations of Exodus 15 or of Deuteronomy 32 that we’re talking about now, you’ll be like, “Are they translating the same thing?” And in some cases, they’re not, because different translators will try to find out different things to do with it. What we now call the quote-unquote “original Hebrew” is based on manuscripts that start around the eleventh century A.D. And that’s a lot of times called the Masoretic text—it’ll be abbreviated “MT” for that—and the reason it’s called that is the Masoretes were a particular school of Jewish scribes and what they did was, in addition to copying the text, they put in the little marks for the vowels, because Hebrew, like most semitic languages, you don’t write the vowels. But they put in vowel marks because how you vocalize the word, what vowels you pronounce when you say it, can change the meaning of the word a lot in a lot of cases. If you know some Arabic, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

But so, they went in, put in the vowel marks. But that means they had to do an interpretation when they did that. They were interpreting it a certain way, by the way they put those marks. And if you take the marks away you could read it very differently. They also put in all kinds of margin notes along the sides, at the bottom – if you get a Hebrew Bible or Hebrew Old Testament you’ll see, there’s all these margin notes and they’re all in Hebrew, all around the sides and the bottom and everything, where they’re commenting on the text and commenting on why they put the vowel marks they did, and other things. If they noticed what they thought was a mistake, they wouldn’t correct it. They would just copy exactly what they had, and they’d basically write in the margin, “We think this is a mistake; we think this should say this other thing.” But they still preserve what they have.

This is in contrast to Christian copyists in the New Testament, who are constantly trying to fix things. But fortunately, we have thousands and thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament, so we can see all the places where they tried to fix things, and we can correct for it. It’s a different approach. So, a lot of, especially older, Bibles, older English Bibles, will be translated from that Hebrew. Newer ones, in Deuteronomy 32, will take into account the Dead Sea Scrolls and 4QDeut, as it’s abbreviated, which is the Deuteronomy scroll they found in the fourth cave at Qumran, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which nobody tried to fix. And it generally kind of matches the Greek translation better because the Septuagint, the old Greek translation from the third century B.C., of the Torah, tried to do something with it, because, again, the Hebrew was no more – that Paleo-Hebrew was no more clear to them than it is to us, and so, they were looking at it going, “Ehh.”

So, they interpreted it, but when we found the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is like a thousand-plus years older, it made sense of a lot of what was going on in the Greek. It was like, “Oh, okay, that’s why they did that. Ohh, I get it now.” So, some, now, Old Testaments you get, in Deuteronomy 32, will take the Dead Sea Scrolls into account; some of them will just throw up their hands and just translate the Greek, because the Greak is at least clear. They made clear choices in the Greek and just said, “This is what we’re going with.” So, the quote here follows the Greek. He’s quoting the Greek of Deuteronomy 32 from the Septuagint, the old Greek translation. Now, who’s he talking about? Deuteronomy 32 – who is being referred to as “the firstborn coming into the world”? Adam.

Interlocutor 1: Ah. That makes sense.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That’s Adam. “Let all the angels of God worship Him.” You go, “Wait, what?” [laughter] And this is, this reading from Deuteronomy 32, gets elaborated in tandem with the fall of the devil when you read pseudepigraphic literature – which is, when you read Second-Temple Jewish literature. Jewish literature from the Second Temple period, from sixth-century B.C. to first century A.D. Because most of this literature is written to answer questions, and to try to interpret and connect dots, and figure things out. So, one of the things we’re trying to figure out, well, why does the devil – they saw the devil falling in Genesis 3. Why does he go after Adam and Eve? And he ends up getting cursed and falling. So, why? And they brought in this verse.

Now, “worship” here is being used loosely; it really is more, “bow before,” “bow to,” “bow to him.” So, the idea here, when you read that larger literature, is that—and this actually gets picked up in Islam of all things—in this literature, the idea is that man is made in the image of God, and they’re picking up on this idea that what you have going on in Genesis 1 and 2 is the reverse of the temple-building process in the ancient world. You build a mountain if you’re building a ziggurat; you build a temple, pyramid, whatever, usually shaped like a mountain, like the mountain of God, which is where Paradise is, and then you build everything, you set everything in order, then the last step is you go in and you an image, you put an idol of the God in there. And they did this ritual called the opening of the nostrils, where they then do that, the spirit of the god then comes into the idol, and so now you’re good to go to feed it and water it and clothe it and get it to do what you want; that’s the idea.

This gets reversed and turned on its head in Genesis 1 and 2, because it’s God who comes and creates the garden, Paradise, and puts it on the mountain. And then he goes and makes an image of himself, he makes Adam as his own image, and puts him in the garden. And then he breathes the breath of life into him; he breathes his Spirit into him and brings him to life to serve as his image the way we were talking about. And so, they understood this verse as being about Adam and about – once that’s done, well now, if he’s the image of God, if he’s serving as the image of God in creation now, then the angels, God’s other creatures, his previous creatures – they need to come and bow down and serve… human. Well, the devil didn’t like that much. And so, you get this idea of envy.

And you see this, the Church Fathers talk about this. You can look at St. Andrew of Caesarea and his commentary on Revelation chapter 12, he says, “We must accept what the Fathers teach, that after the creation of the world the devil fell through envy.” Pretty clear. Sixth century. Talking about this idea: the devil saw this unique relationship between God and humanity, having to do with him as the image, and everything that implies which includes what we call Theosis, includes what would become the Incarnation, and he’s jealous of that. And that’s why he ends up falling. He can’t – we talk about, we’ve got a lot of John Milton in our heads; in our popular imaginary, there’s this idea that the devil’s like, “I’m going to have a revolution! And I’m going to throw God off his throne!” Puritans were big on that kind of thing. But if you think about it for a few seconds, how would you do that?

Interlocutor 1: Why would you think it could succeed?

Fr. Stephen: Well, how would it even be possible? What lever could you use to remove God from– right? If you or I – “I’m going to make myself God!” Okay, what’s step one? A creature can’t– So, that whole idea, even though Milton’s a fun read, dog don’t hunt.

The idea is that, well, the devil can’t get at God—he can’t do anything to God; he’s a creature—but he can try to destroy his fellow creatures. He can do something to Adam and Eve. He can make them evil like himself. He can try to corrupt them; he can try to corrupt God’s creation; he can be sort of parasitic. And this is going to be one of the major themes in Revelation 12; that’s why St. Andrew brings it up there: this idea that the dragon there in Revelation 12 really wants to go after Christ, but can’t really do anything to Christ, and so he goes after his followers. He goes after the people Christ loves. Same kind of idea. He can’t go after God himself, but he can go after these humans who God loves so much, and that’s why he’s angry in the first place, and envious in the first place. So, but again, he’s saying that the Son, capital-S, is different from the angelic sons of God. Why? Because he’s human. Because he’s human. He’s not just this descendant of David; he is the descendant of Adam. So, it’s not just the Messianic king, but also the true man. The true human.

Verse 7: “And of the angels He says: ‘Who makes His angels spirits and His ministers a flame of fire.’ ” That’s from another psalm. Psalm 104 or 103. So, he says that about the angels, he makes them spirits, makes his ministers a flame of fire.”

Verse 8: “But to the Son He says: ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; a scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness more than Your companions.’ ” And that is Psalm 45 or 44, [verses] 6 and 7. And that psalm is talking about the Davidic king again, meaning both the line of David and the one particular – the Messiah, the son of David.

But notice, “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; a scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Your kingdom. You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” So, the person being talked to is called “God,” but then there’s “God, Your God,” the God of Gods. “God, Your God.” So, were they saying David is God? No. Or the rest of his descendants are God? No. But one of the things you find when you compare Second Samuel 7, which is from where he just quoted, the language from the promise to David about his descendants, to the parallel passage in First Chronicles, is that in the version that you have in Second Samuel, it says that – it talks about a descendant of David sitting on David’s throne in David’s kingdom forever. It’s “your throne in your kingdom.” In First Chronicles, it’s, “a descendant of yours will sit on my throne in my kingdom forever.”

So, you have this parallel where the throne of David becomes the throne of God; those two thrones come together; rather than just one being the icon, one being the image of the other, they become the same. And that’s reflected here in this psalm that’s talking about the Davidic king, because it says, “Your throne, O God.” It’s the Davidic king – the ultimate king, the Messiah, is sitting on God’s throne – First Chronicles. But the rest [inaudible] requires – “You have loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” That “anointed with the oil” – anointed with oil is how you were made king. Samuel anoints David. So, there are companions or fellows, there are human companions and fellows involved.

Interlocutor 1: Which means other humans.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So, before we go on, notice, again, we might think – if we were sitting down to write this today, if I was a really horrible Bible study teacher who wanted to run you all off and so I said, “We’re going to have essay tests!” and I said, “Write a couple-page essay on the difference between the way Jesus Christ is the Son of God to the way angels are called sons of God,” I think all of us, myself included, would start with, “Well, he’s God himself. Angels are created; he’s uncreated.” That would be where I would start. And we’re going to get there. But that’s in view two, here in Hebrews.

But that’s not where Hebrews starts. Hebrews starts with the reason Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the Messiah, is greater than these angelic beings is because he’s the Christ, or the Messiah. Is because he’s also a human. Is because he is human, meaning he has that special relationship that Adam had, but he fulfills it; he’s the express image. He’s not just called to be the image; he is the image. He did love righteousness and hate wickedness, and David – ehh. And he is the Davidic king who reigns. He is the Messiah. That’s point one for Hebrews, that makes him greater than any of the angels. Because that is not true of any of the angelic beings. They may be vast cosmic intelligences, but that isn’t true of them. They aren’t that. And, as he’s laid out here, humanity is, itself, in a certain way, greater than the angelic creation. And so, that by itself makes him greater.

But then it continues. Verse 10: “And: ‘You, Lord, in the beginning laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You remain; and they will all grow old like a garment; like a cloak You will fold them up, and they will be changed. But You are the same, and Your years will not fail.’ ” Now, notice, that’s joined with an “and” to the quote we just had. Meaning these two things are being put in parallel. So, on one hand, we have Christ, from among his fellows and his companions, being anointed, being enthroned. This is parallel to something we saw him do in that first sentence. Now, on the other hand, we have him being eternal. Him being from forever. Everything’s created again through Christ. And like that idea that St. Augustine picked up on, of the seculum, of the world, all this perishes; it grows old; it wears out, gets replaced by something new. But not God. And not God the Son, as well. Same thing. So, again, why do we put this in parallel? Well, we don’t want you to go too far in the one direction. “Oh, okay, he’s greater because he’s human. So the Son is human.” Well, hold your horses. Yes, but also… Don’t go too far down that trail; come back a little this way.

Verse 13 – and here he flips over the card: “But to which of the angels has He ever said: ‘Sit at My right hand, till I make Your enemies Your footstool’?” There it is: Psalm 110/109, verse 1. Referring to that whole enthronement, Daniel 7, the whole thing. He didn’t say that to any of the angels. Only to the Son, through whom he created the ages, and who is human, who is the Son of Man, the son of Adam, which is what that literally says in Hebrew – “ben Adam,” the son of Adam, and who is enthroned, who is the Messianic king; this is the same person. Laid out here pretty clearly.

Verse 14: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for those who will inherit salvation?” Who’s the “they” here? The angels. He didn’t say that to the angels. That’s not the destiny of angels; that’s the destiny of man, those who will inherit salvation. Humanity, who inherits salvation, are served by the angels – that Deuteronomy 32 quote. The angels are God’s servants for aiding in the salvation of humanity. But we’re not the singular heir; we’re not the Son and heir; Christ is the Son and heir. But we’re the ones who, through him, inherit salvation. But the angels are there to serve us, and therefore to serve him. They don’t accomplish salvation. They aren’t the ones who bring salvation. They aren’t the heirs of salvation. Yessir?

Interlocutor 1: This is a matter of – you’ve gone in one direction, and I want to [inaudible] You’ve talked about how man is superior to the angels; why is it said that we’re a little lower than the angels?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I’m going to punt on that because if you look, chapter 2, a little ways into chapter 2, it quotes that passage at length. So, that’s exactly where Hebrews is going, but that’s going to wait until next time, so we have a cliffhanger. Yeah, we’re going to get into that in chapter 2, because that’s exactly where this homily’s going to go. We’ve gone in the one direction, and now we’re going to come back in the other. Yessir?

Interlocutor 2: What was the psalm quoted in verse 13?

Fr. Stephen: 13 is Psalm 110, or 109 in the Greek.

Interlocutor 1: That’s the one that’s being commented on.

Fr. Stephen: That’s the one that the whole epistle is going to be – and if you go and read Psalm—and it’s short, so you can read it real quick—Psalm 110, 109 if you’re looking it up in the Orthodox Study Bible, you’ll see that all the stuff that’s going to pop up later in Hebrews, like Melchizedek and stuff, is all in that Psalm. He starts out with it here and then it all plays out across the book. And we, the way we’re taught to preach now, mainly by Protestants – I’ll be controversial, having taken preaching courses now from an Orthodox seminary, and a good Orthodox seminary, we’re just cribbing from the Protestants on homiletics, having also taking courses at a Protestant seminary.

We would not diverge like this, if we were preaching on a psalm, we’d be breaking down the grammar of the verses and sticking pretty close to it and everything, and so it may seem like, “Well, if he’s talking about Psalm 110, why does he keep quoting all this other stuff? And again, and another quote, and then, and this, and that, and then, and then.” But all I can say is, look at some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is just how they did it. This is just how they did it. “You want to understand this verse? Well, think about–” – and remember, because when you quote, you’re not just quoting the one verse, you’re quoting the whole idea, the whole chunk, so it’s, “think about this passage; think about this passage; think about this passage. Now read this verse.” That’s the way it’s done.

So have this idea, this idea, this idea, that idea, okay, now let’s read the verse together, see how it connects. That’s the approach, and so that was very common first century B.C., first century A.D., and that’s what’s going on here in Hebrews. That’s why he keeps throwing in these other passages. Because it’s – you’ve got to have these ideas in your head to be able to read and understand it.

And this is just basically true for the way we interpret everything. It’s not just learning the language. One of the hardest things – I read some Dostoyevsky before I was Orthodox, and I read some Dostoyevsky after I entered the Orthodox Church; it made a lot more sense afterwards. Because you get these weird things, one of my favorites is, there’s an English translation of, I think it’s Brothers Karamazov, where at one point a person’s trying to ask someone if they’re religious, and it’s translated as, “Are you a pious man? Do you eat pancakes for the dead?” Yeah, for your average American Protestant, it was like, “What? Pancakes for the dead? What kind of weird–” Of course, someone got confused by the word Panikhida, I think. But if you don’t know Russian and Orthodox Christian customs, and manners, and ways of dress, and everything, and you try and read a Russian novel from the nineteenth century, unless it has super-extensive footnotes and annotations, you’re going to get confused.

You have to have – we call this “being meta” now, you do sub-references, but if you have comedy or something where the joke is that they’re quoting a line from a classic movie, and you’ve never seen the movie, you’re not going to get the joke. So, any communication, any writing, and preaching, any teaching – in order to understand it you have to, as best you can, approximate what the original writer and hearers would have had in their head, in order to interpret it and understand it correctly. It’s not just the language; it’s all those things, culturally and everything, and ways of seeing.

And so, that’s what lies behind this mode of preaching. You’re going to look at this verse, you’re going to think it’s weird and it’s not going to make any sense to you, or you’re not going to see how this has anything to do with Christ, or you’re not going to see how it has anything to do with the point I’m making, unless you are also remembering this part of Scripture and that part of Scripture and this idea and that idea, and if you have all those in mind, then it’ll all click. “Oh, now it makes sense.”

And so that’s what lies behind this method that’s being used in Hebrews, even though he didn’t – I won’t digress on this too much, but every once in a while, you get folks—I’ll put it that way, “Ya get folks”—who will say, “Well, why are you using these modern terms? Why are you looking at modern scholarship, and this and that and the other thing? Ancient people didn’t have that. People who wrote the Bible didn’t have those terms. St. Paul didn’t know what ‘being meta’ was.” And what that misunderstands is that modern terms are terms that are used to convey concepts, and the fact that a term didn’t exist doesn’t mean that the concept didn’t exist.

And so, the concept and the understanding of what we today call “intertextuality” – that’s the fancy, if you go and spend a lot of money like I did to get a Biblical Studies PhD, you learn about “iNtErTeXtUaLiTy,” which is just, “Hey, this text references that text,” but “intertextuality” is the fancy word for what this is: taking this text and that text and this text and bringing them together and showing the relationship and drawing meaning out of the relationship. None of those terms existed, but that’s what Hebrews is doing. That’s very clearly – and we now have come up with this term to refer to that, rather than just saying, “Hey, that thing Hebrews does,” or, “You know when they, like, quote the one Bible verse and then they quote, like, another Bible verse, and then, like, they take a third passage–” It’s much easier to say, “intertextuality,” even though it’s a modern term, to convey that when we communicate. So, the fact that you’re using modern terms or some kind of modern method to try to get back at ancient ideas does not mean you’re a modernist; that’s not the same thing.

But anyway. Thank you, everybody, and we’ll pick up here and get into chapter 2 next week.