Announcer: Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Fr. Stephen De Young teaches verse by verse on the podcast The Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies and is an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Fr. Stephen De Young: So the Torah becomes this building block and is the Scriptures for most of biblical history.

So the books that we're going to get to after we go through the Torah—like Joshua, like Judges, 1-4 Kingdoms, or 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings—those books are all written long after the fact,

because, for example, 1-4 Kingdoms, or 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings, are one unit, right? They're telling one story of the history of Israel that ends with the exile in Babylon, which means—

When was it written?

It wasn't being written over the centuries as it happened. It was written at the end, telling the whole story.

So, in the time of King David, what are the Scriptures? The Torah, and well after that.

So, the Torah assumes the form that we have it in now, and the rest of the books of the Hebrew Bible get added, most of them at least, get added to it after the exile.

That's when that forms and comes together.

That's not saying they were all written after the exile, but that's saying when the current form we have comes together.

And then some of the books of the Hebrew Bible and several more books that are in the Christian Old Testament come into being over the course of the next centuries and get added to it.

One more note on the Torah as a whole, and then we'll get into Genesis proper.

And that is my note on the Septuagint and the correct usage of that term.

This is: Now I'm going to grind my axe.

I was talking about those guys with JEDP grinding theirs, this is one of mine.

As Fr. Andrew says every time I say I'm going to grind my axe: "It should be pretty sharp by now," but that won't stop me. [Laughter]

So, this is something that commonly happens, and it would be okay that it commonly happens if a lot of Orthodox folks didn't get the wrong idea from it.

What commonly happens is that people refer to any Greek version of the Old Testament as the Septuagint.

What's the problem with that?

Well, when you say the Septuagint with a definite article, it makes you think you're talking about one thing.

There are at least five different Greek versions of the Christian Old Testament—I say at least—and none of those is correctly labeled the Septuagint.

So there is an Old Greek version. It's called the Old Greek because that's sort of the first Greek translation, sort of the first pass.

And then after that, we know of three people named Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion who did revisions. Each did their own revision of the Hebrew books into Greek.

And then we know about a fifth. We don't know who did it, but we found fragments of it in different places. And it's called the kaige—not Kanye, the kaige—recension, which is— It's called that because that literally means "and then" in Greek.

And there's a particular—I won't go too crazy on this, but there's a particular construction that's very common in Hebrew.

If we translated the Hebrew of the Old Testament very literally, almost every sentence would start with "and": and this happened and that happened and this happened and that happened.

And so whoever did this Greek translation translated it really literally, because almost every sentence starts with "and then! and then! and then! and then!" which gets really monotonous but—

And that's how we identify it when we find fragments.

We'll find a piece of one of the books, and it's "and then and then and then..." It's like: Oh, this must be one of those, from that translation.

But in the in the ancient Church, all of these translations were available.

There's a famous work that Origen put together called the Hexapla—hex for six—which had the whole Old Testament in six columns,

and the six columns were the Hebrew, the Hebrew transliterated into Greek—

I don't know what that was for; I guess that was for people who knew the Hebrew language but not Hebrew letters?—

and then those first four Greek versions: the Old Greek, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion—

in parallel columns so you could study the Old Testament and look at all of these.

Interestingly, Theodotion did his revision in the second century AD.

He was a Jewish person who was not a Christian, who was revised— because the Christians were using the older Greek Old Testaments.

He wanted to revise the Greek translation to bring it closer to the Hebrew, and, in his mind, make it less Christian.

Here's the interesting part: The version of the book of Daniel that we read on Holy Saturday in the Orthodox Church is Theodotion's translation of Daniel, from the second century AD, made by a non-Christian.

That's just an interesting fun fact.

So what is the Septuagint, then, and why am I talking about this in terms of the Torah?

The Septuagint is a particular translation of the Torah.

"Septuagint" means the 70, the work of the 70.

So in, at— It's around 250, circa 250 BC in Alexandria, the Ptolemaic governor was working on the library at Alexandria, wanted all the world's wisdom in it,

and so he commissioned a translation of the Torah, of the Judean people, a translation of the Torah into Greek so he could put it in the library.

And he got 70 rabbis, 70 scribes, 70 Jewish scholars, to do the translation.

We have this letter called the Letter of Aristeas that describes this, because this is treated as a miraculous occurrence.

And so these 70 rabbis worked independently.

Each one of them, over the course of 70 days, to produced a translation of the Torah in Greek.

And at the end of the 70 days when they compared the 70 copies, they were identical—this is the miraculous part.

And so that translation, which is the Old Greek of the Torah, but only of the Torah, that is the Septuagint.

So when the Church Fathers— like when St. Jerome talks about the work of the 70 and the Church Fathers talk about the work of the 70, they're referring to that version of the Torah, that Greek translation of the Torah.

So if someone comes to you and says, "The Septuagint is the Orthodox Old Testament," you can just shake your head at them. Say, "Nope." [Laughter]

So that's me grinding my axe and a public service announcement.

So the Septuagint is the Old Greek, the first Greek translation of the of the Torah.

And that is what the Orthodox Study Bible of these five books is based on; it's based on that version of the Greek, translated into English.

So as we go through, the text we're reading— This is actually a— I know I've picked on the Orthodox Study Bible in the New Testament a lot, but that's because they're using the New King James, so I'm not really picking on the Orthodox Study Bible; I'm picking on the New King James.

This is not the New King James.

This is a really good English— the Pentateuch, the Torah here is a really good English translation of that Greek edition, so I will be picking on the translation a lot less.

What I will occasionally be doing where there are differences is talking about the Hebrew and comparing the two,

because one of the ways in which working with, in this case the actual Septuagint, is helpful is that when these Greek translations were made they had to make decisions,

because when you translate, it isn't one word in this language equals another word in this other language.

That's not how translation works.

When you take like first-year Spanish, that's how it works, but that's not how translation really works.

You have to make a lot of decisions, and especially, like in the Torah, we talked about like those passages—those passages were already ancient and obscure by the time the rabbis were trying to translate them into Greek.

And so they're places where they had to make big interpretive decisions, like: What does this Hebrew word even mean? because it wasn't in use anymore.

And so when you compare the two you can see: Oh, this is the interpretation they took; this is how they understood it.

You can kind of see what they're doing, and so it's almost a commentary when you compare the two, like a commentary on the Hebrew. So we will compare that.

So all that: introduction to the Torah.

Introduction to Genesis!

So genesis, then, is the beginning of the Torah. It's also, as we mentioned,the prologue to the Torah.

So this is setting up what's going to happen, beginning in Exodus.

Q1: Can I ask you a question before you go on?

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Yeah, yeah.

Q1: So that business of the Letter of Aristeas and how the 70 translators came up in 70 days with 70 identical translations. I would assume— Are we to believe that or not? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah! [Laughter] I can't force you. I cannot compel you. Yeah, I mean, it's an extra-biblical miracle. So it depends on your propensity to believe in such things.

As extra-biblical miracles go, it's relatively reserved, like, I mean, you know, we're not raising the dead here or stopping the sun in the sky, but... I can't compel you.

So, yeah. So Genesis is not just like a historical preamble, but it is—

So from the beginning of Exodus to the end of Deuteronomy, we're basically dealing with the life of Moses with the people of Israel, and the teachings that the people of Israel received through Moses, the covenant that's received through Moses—all these concepts we'll talk about more when we get there.

But Genesis is not just a lead into this, but is setting up the patterns for what we're going to see later.

Some example— I mean, right off the bat, next week when we get into chapter one, we have creation structured after seven days, so the whole idea of the sabbath.

There's not going to be any commandment given to humanity about the sabbath at this point; that's going to come later,

but the way in which that is related to the world and how that envisions the relationship between humanity and the world and humanity and God is being established already back here in Genesis.

When we get to the story of the flood, Noah is going to be told to bring a certain number of every clean animal and a different number of every unclean animal on the ark.

And you're going to go: Wait, where's this "clean" and "unclean" animal thing coming from?

This is going to come later. It's going to come later, but we're having certain things and certain patterns established here in Genesis that are going to play out; they're going to play out later.

And so that's that's an important perspective, again, because we tend to read Genesis as these sort of isolated Bible stories.

When I was a kid going to Sunday school I got these stories—

And that was good! It's good to at least know the stories, especially when you're a little kid you're not

ready for sort of advanced math, right?

Like just knowing the stories, knowing when somebody talks about Jacob and Esau what they're talking about, that's a good start right when you're six, seven, eight years old.

But as we get older and want to understand...

And that first level of lessons—those sort of moral lessons and stuff you can learn from it—are good and valuable lessons for people of a certain age to get out of the book of Genesis,

but there's much more more going on at deeper levels than that, and one of the ways we discover that is the relationship between Genesis and the rest of the Torah.

Genesis is is really divided into two pieces: Genesis 1 through 11 is one piece, and then 12 through 50.

There are 50 chapters in Genesis, and of course that's by design, because the chapter breaks come in much later, but with our current chapter breaks, 1 through 11 is one piece, and 12 through 50 is a second piece.

And so that division has been over-emphasized by a lot of people in recent days.

We got past, mostly, the JEDP thing, where we're chopping it up into tiny, tiny pieces, but a lot of folks will want to make that break between chapters 11 and 12 a chasm.

They will want to say that Genesis 1 through 11 is one genre, like they'll call it mythology, and then 12 through 50 is a different genre, that it's a kind of traditional history, and completely separate pretty much everything else about them.

And the problem with that— One of the problems—this is a problem with JEDP; this is a problem with all these attempts to sort of divide things up like this—is that um you have to believe that the people responsible for the form of the text that we have now were both, bluntly, geniuses and idiots at the same time.

So you have to believe that they're geniuses in terms of how they crafted it and brought all of these traditions together and produced this beautiful document,

but at the same time they were sloppy about it, so we can find all the seams, and they didn't have anything real particular in mind in terms of how they put it together,

that just Genesis 1 through 11 and 12 through 50 really have nothing to do with each other; they just ended up next to each other somehow with this real obvious seam in between them, and there's no connection,

that whoever that editor was who put them together didn't have any plan or thinking of how these related to each other, you know—which obviously is a problem.

You can have it either way.

If you want to say, "Well, they're just dumb and this is all just a hodgepodge and all thrown together," you can try and argue that, but I think anyone who reads it would disagree with you.

Anyone who reads it can say, "Well, no. There is something going on here. The final product that we have: there is definitely something going on here."

And so if you're going to argue the other, if you're going to argue, "No, there is something going on here," there are at least— even if you're an atheist, "there is some kind of literary genius at work here in the ancient world,"

then you have to take seriously the fact that these two things were put together.

And so, as we go through, I'm going to argue that Genesis 1 through 11 is like chapter 1, and 12 through 50 is like chapter 2 of a book, and then Exodus, chapter 3.

So they're there for a reason; they're in the same book for a reason. They're building off of each other.

That doesn't mean you can't make a distinction, because the distinction is very obvious.

What you have in Genesis 1 through 11 is you have basically three stories:

You have the creation of the world and the expulsion from paradise in Genesis 1 through 3;

you have the story of Cain and his descendants leading up to the flood in Genesis 4 through 9;

and you have the story of the dividing of the nations in Genesis 10 and 11.

You've got three stories in genesis 1 through 11, and those three stories are far apart in time.

They have completely different characters, different people, different actors, in them.

And then Genesis 12 through 50, you're dealing with Abraham; his son, Isaac; his son, Jacob; his son, Joseph,

so you're dealing with four generations of one family: you have this unity of your cast of characters, as it were, this unity of place and time in chapters 12 through 50 that you don't have in 1 through 11.

So there is a distinction there. It's a different kind of story that's being told, but they're not two completely different, radically separate things that should be read completely differently.

And what we're going to see unfold is that, essentially— and we'll be talking about this more as we go, but those three stories in Genesis 1 through 11 are sort of three falls of humanity.

It has to do with death and sin and then demonic powers.

And then, 12 through 50, chapter 12 starting with Abraham, this is the beginning of God's solution to that problem, and that starts with the call of Abraham

and then plays out in his descendants who are going to become not just the nation of Israel, but Edom, Amman, Moab, all of these Abrahamite nations that are going to show up later in the Torah and that are going to be part of this plan.

So that's the broad strokes.

There is also an interesting internal structure to the book of Genesis.

There is this phrase that recurs in Hebrew, which is eleh toledot in Hebrew.

It's usually translated in English as a very literal translation of the Greek, actually, as: "This is the book of the generations," and it's not always of a human.

At one point, it's: "This is the book of the generations of the heavens and the earth": the first one.

But that sometimes introduces a genealogy, sometimes it doesn't; sometimes it introduces the story of a person.

And so we'll mention that as we go through when that phrase shows up, that forms kind of an internal structure.

But that framing device is another piece of evidence that, at least at the end of the process of the book of Genesis, as we have it now, there was someone who had a structure in mind for the whole thing.

There was someone who saw this whole thing and who structured it very specifically, by using that phrase, which is not just a normal phrase,

like you don't find that phrase in the rest of the Old Testament, so it's a very specific phrase for Genesis and for the structure that it that it provides.

I'll go on a little more. I won't get into— Well, maybe I'll do it a little now. Then we won't have to do it next week. I'll do it a little now and then we won't have to do it next week.

So since we're about to start Genesis one, I'll just— I'll do the science question now. [Laughter]

So because this will come up, but if we do it now, I think we'll make better progress through the text next week.

This is related to where I started, too, so this will be a good book to the introductions.

So no one in the ancient world thought that Genesis was a science textbook, probably cause they didn't have science textbooks, but in terms of— they weren't looking to it to answer the questions that we use science to answer.

This is a really bad way of interpreting not just the Bible, but the stories, the myths of other ancient peoples.

"Oh, they came up with Zeus because they didn't know where lightning came from."

No. That's not— They weren't trying to answer the questions that we use science to answer and just coming up with bad answers because they were dumb. That's not how any of this works.

From our perspective as Christians, the book of Genesis does not represent any humans' attempts to explain anything.

It represents teaching from God to humanity through Moses.

Genesis in particular and especially the first 11 chapters has traditionally, starting in Second Temple Judaism with books like the book of Jubilees, been understood to be a vision that Moses received while he was on Mount Sinai,

meaning: How does he know about the creation of the world? He wasn't around then.

He wasn't around for the tower of babel, wasn't around for the flood.

And so this this sort of early preternatural history is a vision that Moses received, sort of parallel to—we just went through Revelation—the vision St. John receives, but this is a vision of the beginnings of the world.

And so that means it's it was understood in Second Temple Judaism, in ancient Christianity, to be sort of visionary material,

and so you don't find people trying to interpret it scientifically for the same reason they wouldn't interpret Daniel's visions or Isaiah's visions scientifically.

You're looking for: What is God communicating? because this if this is teaching from God, then that means this is not a text that's here to answer my questions and my curiosities.

It's: God wants to teach me certain things that I need to know.

So, to be very blunt, if God wanted me to know exactly how old the earth is, he could have told us, if he wants us to know exactly: it's this many years old.

I had a conversation about this with somebody earlier today, and I pointed out that, yes, most of the Church Fathers would say that, by our modern dating standards, if we use their dating of when the earth was created, today the earth would be 7500 years old,

but I pointed out there's no way to add up the genealogies in Genesis in the Greek or the Hebrew and get 7500.

You get closer to 6500, so that's not how they were getting that date; that's not where they were getting it.

And so they weren't approaching the text that way. They weren't—

The way this happened is—again, 19th century, you have people wanting to undermine the authority of the Bible, so they start looking for scientific errors: the creation of the world, story of creation, becomes prime target.

"Oh, look. This makes it sound like the earth is flat. This makes it look like it's how the earth is at the center of the solar system. This makes it sound like dadadadadadada. We know that's wrong; throw this whole thing in the dustbin."

And part of the problem is that evangelical Christianity did not answer those modernist kind of arguments by saying: Look, this isn't a science textbook. Look, you're approaching the text in the wrong way. Look, this is what it's trying to teach. Look, this is a story. Look, this is— Here's what the text is saying.

They responded by saying, "There aren't any scientific errors!" and by taking the same kind of modernist approach and just trying to argue for the opposite conclusions.

So I don't mean to pick on Ken Ham, but I'm going to pick on Ken Ham a little bit because he's kind of an example of this.

So Ken Ham, back in the day when I was in college, was putting snakes in barometric pressure chambers to try to simulate what the earth's atmospheric pressure would have been under the firmament to try to prove that snakes wouldn't have been venomous in paradise.

And I'm kind of like...

Yeah, like there's a disconnect here, right?

And he thought—and I'm not trying to make fun of him or pick on him; he's just misguided, because he thought: No, I need to prove that the Old Testament is true.

Q2: When did this happen?

Fr. Stephen: This would have been late '80s.

From his perspective he was trying to prove the Bible's true. It's not a bad instinct, but he was misguided and going about it the wrong way,

because he wasn't really trying to prove that the Bible was true; he was trying to prove that a particular modern reading of the Bible was true right.

And any time we say: Well, the Bible has to be this in order to be the Bible, we're moving in the wrong direction. We're sort of telling God what he has to do.

For me to accept the Bible, for me to follow the authority of the Bible, it has to be this, and if it's not then it can't be the Bible.

God could do whatever he wants. He can give us whatever kind of Bible he wants. The Bible is what it is.

And so it's always important when we approach the Bible that we approach the Bible in terms of: What does God have to communicate to me? What does he have to teach me through this that I'm reading?

Not: I'm curious about XZY, and I go to the Bible to try to find answers.

Is it okay for me to do this? Well, let me see. Oh, I can't find anything that explicitly says that I'm not allowed to do it, so it must be okay!

Because if you approach it in that way, you can kind of find whatever you want. You can kind of define things to the point where you get whatever you want out of it.

If you go to the Bible looking for evidence that the earth is flat, if you're a flat-earther, you can find it. You can find things that you could quote and say, "See? The Bible says the earth is flat so you're all heathens because you think it's a globe!"

You could do all that stuff, but that's not what the Scriptures are for.

So when we get started in Genesis 1 and into Genesis 2, God is not through Moses trying to teach us exactly how he made the world.

It seems to be fundamental hubris to think that we as humans could understand how God created the world.

But he's telling us about— things about his creation of the world to teach us certain things about the world and about ourselves and about our place in the world and about how to live in the world.

And part of the problem with getting into these arguments, about how old the earth is and stuff, is that it completely distracts us from what God is trying to teach us about it.

We just get locked into the battle of, you know— and we'll have round two of this when we get into the book of Exodus—When did the exodus happen? Did it happen? What century? Where exactly did they cross the sea? Where exactly is Mount Sinai?

And you get so locked in those arguments, back and forth, conservative and liberal, that you miss out on: Hey, what is the text trying to teach me? What is it trying to say to me that's actually relevant to my life today, beyond being able to own somebody in an internet argument with facts and logic?

So like this is the approach that we want to take and that I'm going to take right in this Bible study is: What is this communicating? not What curiosities of mine might this answer? not How do I own the atheist who's saying dadadadada?

And one last note before we leave this topic behind for as long as I possibly can.

And that is— There's another piece of hubris here, of course, which is that our atheist friends today are not all that different than our 19th-century German friends in thinking that stand at the culmination of history.

So there's this assumption here that if God had explained to Moses in detail somehow how he created the world, that we would be able to understand that, because it would be in terms of 21st-century science,

because we've now arrived and we now understand these things! unlike those Bronze Age people,

which is a false assumption, just as false as the 19th-century German assumption that they were at the pinnacle of history and there was nothing left to learn.

There are Englishmen in the 19th century saying stuff like that! "We're just dotting a few is and crossing a few ts in terms of science. We've got it all figured out." In the 19th century, while they're taking a coal-fire steamship!

So the reality is, if God did explain it in some kind of scientific terms, not only would Bronze Age people have gotten nothing out of it, we'd probably get nothing out of it.

No one would understand it, and that's why he didn't.

He didn't come to Moses and speak English or German. He came to Moses and spoke Paleo-Hebrew, the Paleo-Hebrew dialect, the dialect that Moses would understand at the time,

and he explained and described things in those terms, and he gave him a vision that he could at least transcribe if not fully understand.

And so that's how God communicates to us, because he's trying to communicate, not be scientifically accurate to satisfy somebody in a particular time period in a particular culture.

Okay, so now I will leave that topic behind probably until we get to Exodus, and then I'll have to have a brief discursus on why I don't care about the date of the exodus.

But this was the "why I don't care about how old the earth is." [Laughter]

Q2: You could say that about our country about what you just said.

We tend to forget that our own age is an age, and will come to the day of judgment.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, lots of people in the past believe things that I think are now laughable and stupid.

And if the world is still around 2,000 years from now and they have anything I've ever written, I'm sure they will think a lot of what I wrote is laughable and stupid. That's just how it goes. [Laughter]

Q1: Nowadays, things that are laughable and stupid are not!

Fr. Stephen: Yes! Yes, even if today it's heralded as: "Oh, these are brilliant ideas," it may be laughable and stupid by then.

Yes, sir.

Q3: I recently saw a quotation from a guy who was in charge of the patent office in 1899, and he said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Fr. Stephen: Yes! [Laughter] Yes, I mean, that's the whole modern spirit, is: "We're just about there." [Laughter]

Q2: Pluto used to be a planet, but now it's not any more.

Q4: I remember Pluto!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, now there's only eight planets in the solar system. Who knew?

So next time, I promise, we will pick up immediately, because I will not review this introduction.

We'll pick up immediately with Genesis 1:1, and it will be a Bible study that does what it says on the tin, and we'll actually study the Bible directly,

but I felt like I needed to do some introduction here before we we kick in.

So thank you, everybody!

Announcer: Listen next time as Fr. Stephen De Young continues his study of the Scriptures on The Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen's email address is wholecounsel at ancientfaith.com. That's wholecounsel at ancientfaith.com.