Halting Toward Zion – 7-27-20 Repairing the Timeline
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
Last week we wrapped up our series on the Prince of Egypt, and this week we’re talking more about ancient Egypt, but more using that as a springboard to talk about hermeneutics. We’ll get there in a minute because every once in a while we like to do a little ice breaker, a little intro, so that you can get to know us better and we can get to know each other better.
I have asked each of my co-hosts here to supply for me either the first line of a favorite book, or a favorite first line of a book, and the other two of us will have to guess what book it belongs to. Greg, would you like to go first?
Greg: Sure, but in typical fashion for this podcast, I’m breaking the rule and I have two.
Emily: Two of which? Or is it one of each?
Greg: One was my favorite book but maybe isn’t anymore. The other comes close to being my favorite book, and I read it for the first time just a couple days ago. This one I’m guessing you’ll recognize. “’Matrimony was ordained, thirdly,’ said Jane Studdock to herself, ‘for the mutual society, help, and comfort that one ought to have of the other.’” Do you recognize that?
Emily: Yes.
Bryan: Yes.
Emily: That is a favorite.
Greg: All right, Emily, who and what is that?
Emily: That is C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.
Greg: I taught through it for the umpteenth time this last school year, and this time the class was not very receptive, and I thought some of their objections and criticisms were valid. At some times it turns people into caricatures rather than fully fleshed-out people, and it’s hard to sympathize with just about anybody. And I’ve always had my own criticisms of how he ends it up. I think he sets himself up for failure by dismissing the church and its ministry.
It’s reduced to one thing. Merlin says, “What about the church?” and he basically says, “It’s scattered. There’s no help there.” I think Jesus has a different opinion of his church than that, and I think Lewis could have got around it by saying, “Right now we’re the part of the church that’s on duty.”
Emily: Right, yeah! I was going to say there’s definitely an active community of believers here.
Greg: Yeah, but that said, there are so many good lines and relevant themes for right now. It is, in a sense, pseudo dystopian. It shows us a political/economic/scientific organization pushing for world control using sociology and the natural sciences, and the world they want to hand us is very dystopian indeed. Over against that is set Professor Ransom and his household of nice people, not all of whom are Christians.
It really is a tale of two cities or two companies – the company of St. Anne’s, most of whom are Christians and who treat each other well, and believe in honesty and love and compassion and the value of God’s world, and then the other side who pretend to care about things, but lie to each other, stab each other in the back, and are out to destroy the planet. There are many themes and ideas here that are relevant.
The second book, let’s see if you know this one. I didn’t. I never would have got it. I’ve always put it off, for a very particular reason, which I’ll tell you in a second. Let’s see if you know this one.
“When he was nearly 13, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” Anyone know that?
Emily: Yes, I know what this is, don’t I?
Greg: Possibly. It’s very popular.
Emily: It’s something you hadn’t read before, right?
Greg: I’d never read it before.
Emily: I think you once told me that you had no interest in reading this book.
Greg: Yeah. I was mistaken. I enjoyed it thoroughly. My wife and girls kept saying, “No, no, no, we understand your objection but that’s minor,” and they were right. It was a very wonderful book for a number of reasons. Bryan, do you recognize it at all?
Bryan: No, I do not.
Greg: It’s one that we haven’t started using at school, until I think this last year my wife used it in American Lit. So what is it, Emily?
Emily: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I have not read it, but I’m glad to hear you recommend it.
Greg: I will go lightly on it then. All I knew about it was that it involved some kind of trial and that racism was involved with this. Because of my own background and lineage, I don’t like racism, to the point that I run screaming from the room if I’m allowed to. More often I just kind of sulk off and don’t go near those people anymore if I can help it. Talking about it is not something I like, except to denounce it.
But my wife and girls kept saying, “No, that’s a minor element here and it’s handled well. Yes, you will get angry when it shows up, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on,” so I read it and I was very quickly drawn into it. I enjoy the style very much.
It is a slice of southern Americana in the ‘30s, which is just close enough to my own childhood that things that were active and invented or being used or sold and marketed in the ‘30s often endured into the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. “Oh, I know that product! Oh, I know that toy!” so it was part of my life, but there are also a great many relevant comments about the educational system, about Christianity, and I think all that she says is completely fair.
She writes as one who lived in a small southern town and saw the good and the bad, and she’s equally generous with the good and the bad. “Here’s the hypocrisy and moralism of some Christians. Here’s the generosity and honesty of others,” but it’s never too heavy-handed and I think in the end she ties it up predictably, because she’s written herself to the point of, “This is only going to work if this happens.”
Yup, that happened, but that’s what you want. Frodo has to get the ring in the volcano somehow. “What? He didn’t? That’s a dumb story!” So that’s mine, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.
Bryan, have you got one?
Emily: Please have two, because I also have two and I would feel bad if you were the only one who didn’t have two.
Bryan: I do have two. Before I remembered the one that I was just talking to you about before we started recording, I was looking at a different one, and now I have both in front of me on my desk. I’m going to start with the first one, wherein the answer to what it is is given in the first sentence. It’s the way of things. It doesn’t matter, it’s a great line and a great book.
“Here, my dear Marcellinus, is the fulfillment of my promise, a book in which I have taken upon myself the task of defending the glorious City of God against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of that City.”
Emily: My boy Augustine.
Greg: The City of God.
Bryan: The City of God by St. Augustine, on which I made very good progress two weeks ago and have not made progress since. I think I’m in the middle of Book 4 or 5 at the moment. Anyway, it’s been a fantastic read. If you listen back to this podcast you will hear me reference it multiple times because, for some reason, it keeps being very relevant to what we’re discussing.
Greg: In my intro to the unpublished book that’s sort of our map for this podcast, I explicitly compare what we’re talking about to The City of God, except in a very humble way of saying, “And we’re not Augustine and this isn’t The City of God, but we’re going to pursue some of the same things – halting toward Zion, City of God.” There it is.
So don’t hesitate to reference Augustine as we talk today about the necessity of timelines, because a lot of what Augustine was doing was starting history at the beginning and tracking it bit by bit, through the cross and into his own present. There were not very many pagan historians to speak of, but the few there were didn’t do that, so we’re going to be talking about timelines and such.
Bryan: Also speaking of the timelines thing, what I find great is that he’ll spend an entire book just going through the pagans’ own history and showing them how, “You’re complaining about this in Christianity, and you’ve forgotten these three dozen things,” and he’ll give a little sub-heading for each of those three dozen things and tell them why they’re wrong. It’s great. I submit that future editions of The City of God should have the sub-title, “Dabbing on the Pagans,” but I digress.
My second one is slightly related actually, I guess in a way, and I’m actually going to cheat in a different way because I’m going to read the first two sentences.
“January 10th, the seven-hundred-and-fifth year since the foundation of Rome, the forty-ninth before the birth of Christ. The sun had long set behind the Apennine Mountains. Lined up in full marching order, soldiers from the 13th Legion stood massed in the dark.”
Any guesses?
Greg: That’s great, and I have no idea.
Emily: Yeah, same.
Greg: I mean I know when we are and I know where we are, but I do not recognize that. I assume it’s not an ancient book, because the language seems modern, but no, I don’t recognize it.
Bryan: There’s not really any reason why you would know it unless you were talking with me about it two years ago, because I was fanboy’ing over it very hard. This is a book called Rubicon by the English historian, Tom Holland.
Emily: Oh, I’ve heard good things about Tom Holland.
Bryan: Tom Holland is a very interesting figure. He’s a professed agnostic, but he is one of those agnostics who is very, very cognizant of how Christianity is the thing that has made Western civilization as prosperous and free as it is.
Emily: Didn’t he also play Spider-man?
Greg: Yeah, I was wondering about that.
Bryan: That’s a different Tom Holland, though they are both English. I learned about this book also from another fantastic podcast called Hardcore History with Dan Carlin, which everyone should listen to at least once. Reading Rubicon, it became immediately apparent, just from those first couple of sentences, for instance, why Dan Carlin liked it so much. So if you already know Dan Carlin, then you’re going to probably love Rubicon as well. I also recommend Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History.
Emily: Awesome. My first offering for this game is the first line of a favorite book of mine, and I can quote it from memory. It goes, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Bryan: I just have an outside guess that it’s Sense and Sensibility.
Emily: It is not Sense and Sensibility. I would read you the second line to try to help you out, but I lent it to a friend and I have no idea what the second line is.
Greg: It sounds too late for Jane Austen or any of the early Regency or Victorian authors. I would guess mid-1900s, but beyond that, nope, don’t know.
Emily: It is Victorian.
Greg: It’s so brief for Victorian.
Emily: I did mention this a few weeks ago as my favorite book, so I thought it was going to be easy.
Bryan: You’re presuming that we remember every detail. I had a feeling you were going to do this one, too, and I was like, “I should try to remember what that one is that she mentioned,” and I didn’t remember it.
Emily: It is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Greg: I’m glad my wife is not currently in the room because she would be very angry at me, or displeased, because – uh-oh, she’s right there! [To Kate: I didn’t recognize the first line of Jane Eyre. I know you would have. Bryan and I both failed.]
Emily: That was the first line of my favorite book. My favorite first line of a book I’m actually going to give you in Latin because in English it’s too easy. Please don’t laugh at my pronunciation. I learned Latin in choir, not in Latin class. “In foramine terrae habitabat hobbitus.”
Greg: “In a hole in the ground…” we got it.
Bryan: I feel terrible. I can’t remember if that’s actually the opening to The Hobbit or to Fellowship of the Ring.
Greg: That’s The Hobbit. I would have known that anyway; however, I just looked at the opening line of Lord of the Rings, thinking I might use that, and it’s a really bad opening line.
Emily: So that’s two, and now we can get into our actual topic for today, which is the ancient Egyptian problem of chronology.
There have been apparently a lot of changes in how we look at the Egyptian timeline over the past several hundred years, as we start to try and piece together history – that is, if you’re not looking at the Bible. Once you open up the Bible it’s pretty clear about how things go, but I guess there’s been a lot of dispute and progression over the Egyptian timeline.
Greg: Remember that Egyptology began with the translation of the Rosetta Stone. Unlike all other ancient cultures, Egypt was never lost. It just stood there in the desert with sand blowing past it, but there were all these hieroglyphs that no one could read until Champollion came along and, using the Rosetta Stone, was able to decipher it so we could begin to figure things out. That, followed shortly by the rediscovery of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann, began this whole idea of digging in the ground and finding civilizations that were buried. We’re talking late 1800s to early 1900s.
We kind of think, “Well, everybody’s always known about all this ancient stuff.” No, to the point that in the late 1800s, higher critics, as they charged the Bible with many, many errors, one of them was that the Bible created the Assyrian empire and the city of Nineveh out of nothing, that there were no records, no evidence, nothing out there but desert, so the Bible was flat out wrong and just made up this whole Assyrian thing, until Austen Henry Layard actually discovered the ruins of the city, and in that time we have this sudden burst of activity.
Historians, once upon a time, realized – and I would hope they still do – that if you’re going to tell a story of history, you need dates to peg things through. You need to know what happened first, what happened second, what happened third.
There was one obvious place they could go for such a timeline, and, as Emily said, that would be the Bible, which begins with God counting off the days of the first week, and then takes us through genealogies and time summaries and regnal data, up at least to the time of Daniel and the Persian Empire, and possibly even further, depending on what you do with some of Daniel’s prophecies.
So it was there. It was pretty clear. And although biblical scholars have differed over details, the structure was plain enough. You could quibble over plus or minus 100 years, depending on how you took a particular verse, but the archeologists and historians ignored that.
Instead they say, “Egypt is so cool and great. Let’s use it as our measuring rod,” which would be great if they left us a chronology, but they didn’t because they’re pagans. They’re unconcerned with the flow of history because history is a created thing, and to be caught up in history is to be a creature. The whole idea of Egyptian culture, like all the pagan cultures, is to transcend history, time, and creation, so there was no interest in that. Furthermore, they were not above lying about how long they held this or that people in captivity, or how well they did in a particular year, or who they lost to or who they didn’t lose to.
Just a random thing – we have a record of the Assyrian king Sennacherib boasting that he shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage. There’s no word from Assyria about what happened after that. The whole angel of death thing just didn’t make it into their records, so there are things they don’t tell us.
Historians and archeologists wanted this measuring rod, so they went to a scholar named Manetho, and I always forget the dates here, so hopefully I wrote them where I can find them. The first list of Egyptian dynasties was compiled by the Egyptian priest Manetho, who lived about 300 BC. This is what we have. This is not a chronology. This is a list of the dynasties in succession, except we’re not exactly told by Manetho that they’re dynasties in succession and, worse than that, we’re not exactly told anything by Manetho because we don’t have his original book. What we have is him quoted by later authors, who don’t agree on what he said exactly.
The historians and archeologists of the early 20th century said, “And that’s going to be our timeline for measuring out the history of Egypt. And because Egypt is so cool and kind of what we know the most and the center of everything, let’s tie every other nation’s timeline to that.”
Now, Christians can see the problem here by simply laying out the chronology of Egypt as it was originally conceived of and seeing that it reaches back to about 5,000 BC, which means it crosses the flood and creation.
Eventually, Egyptologists got a clue that something was wrong here and they began to look for ways of shortening it up, and the most obvious thing was, “Well, maybe not all of these dynasties reigned in succession.” We know that Menes unified Egypt at a particular time. Does that mean it stayed unified? Couldn’t there have been dynastic wars and divisions? Well, yes, and at this point I think most Egyptologists would recognize this, but still, even after all the shuffling around, the founding of Egypt was still put on the other side of the flood.
As Christians who want to believe what the Bible says about time and dates and such, we have to say, “That’s not right. Egypt had to be born after the Tower of Babel.” In fact, as we read through Genesis 10 and 11 we’re given an idea that the misery of Egypt descended from Ham, one of Noah’s sons, so the Bible puts it in a particular place and particular time, after the flood.
But the thing that’s otherwise difficult for historians who don’t want to listen to the Bible is something the Bible says. This is from 1 Kings 6:1 -
And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord.
Most historians, for good or bad, are pretty well agreed on when Solomon reigned, about 1,000 years before Christ, give or take. And the Bible here says very clearly that the Exodus was 490 years earlier, tracking it down even to the very day. It’s that exact.
So we can go back to Solomon’s reign, count back 490 years, and we come to dynasties that are fairly familiar to anybody who’s read a world history book – Hatshepsut, the first female Pharaoh, who wore a beard in public, and Thutmose III, who expanded Egypt’s military power into Canaan and the Middle East, and the boy king we know as Tut.
These are fairly well-known monarchs, and they ruled in succession. We have enough information so we’re pretty sure they reigned in succession. We know the relationships of the families and such. And nothing major happened during their reigns that would or could be the exodus.
Now, remember again what the Bible tells us about the exodus. By the time God was done, he had destroyed all their crops, all their cattle, removed all of their treasures of silver, gold, and jewels, removed their slave labor, destroyed their army and their chariots, destroyed at least one male in every household, the first born, destroyed the heir to the throne and destroyed their Pharaoh, who, contrary to Hollywood, did die when crossing the Red Sea.
On top of this you have the demoralization, the philosophical and religious defeat of the gods, and there was nothing left there. And yet we look at what the Bible says, and we look at these kings and queens that we know about, and this doesn’t fit. This can’t go here, so either the Bible is wrong or the Egyptian chronology is wrong.
I was walking through a facility we now use for the school when it was first there, and I found a random Bible just thrown down someplace. I picked it up and flipped through it. It’s called the Life Application Study Bible, published in 2004, and it says, “No evidence of this great exodus has been discovered in Egyptian historical records.” And I believe what it says next amounts to, “But since this doesn’t affect anything having to do with our salvation…”
Emily: It doesn’t affect our salvation, whether God can tell us what happens truthfully or not?
Greg: And see, that’s the question. Does infallibility and inerrancy apply to the timeline, to chronology? I assume we probably talked about this some when we talked about creation, because that’s usually where you run into it. God counts off six days and then one more, seven. Can God tell time or not? Is it important that he tell time? When God says so-and-so many days or so-and-so many years, is that spiritual metaphor or can we trust him to tell us the truth?
Paul, in I Corinthians 15 says –
I declare unto you the gospel…how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.
Part of the gospel is that Jesus rose the third day – not the fourth day, not the second day.
Emily: And rose historically and physically in his body.
Greg: Yes, in his body. So if we’re willing to dismiss the Bible’s other chronology, why are we suddenly willing to embrace – or are we? Are we willing to say, “Yeah, Paul puts in ‘third day’ because, you know, it was part of the formula at the time, but he doesn’t really mean it had to be the third day. It was third day-ness or third day-like or some panel of redemptive biblical theology called ‘third day,’ but it wasn’t like there was actually a calendar or clock involved here.”
Does God work in terms of calendars and clocks? That is to say, does he interact with us where we are? He’s not immersed in time, but we are. Does he really speak into our existence? Does he understand it? Is he aware of it? Can he communicate in terms of it? Or is all of his discussion of time what Francis Schaeffer used to call some kind of upper-story experience, where the language has connotations that sound like, “Oooo, that sounds religious, third day, oooo,” but doesn’t really mean anything?
Emily: Of course, God is beyond time and beyond human language, so anything that we use to describe him is compromising his holy other-ness.
Greg: Yes, good Barthianism there, because that’s ultimately what we’re dealing with. This is neo orthodoxy. When I teach the varying interpretations of Genesis 1 in Systematics, that’s always a hard one to explain to young kids, freshman students particularly. What is this Barthianism or neo orthodoxy? And they learn a form and they recite it and they write it down on their final, but I think it takes a while and reading experience and perhaps interaction on a secular campus before you really understand what they’re saying here.
One of my favorite bumper stickers is “God is too great to be contained in any one religion,” which simply is to say, “You cannot say anything about God that is true, nor could they, nor could they, nor could they.” It’s all kind of true-ish if you look at it the right way and hold your mouth right, but don’t try to bind God down to any of that, because that would be putting God in a box. As you say, it would be denying his holy other-ness.
Yet, what the Bible does from Genesis 1:1 is to come to us as a clear revelation of the heart and mind of God in propositional form, where God created all things in the beginning is the opposite of God did not create or God did not create all things or God did not create all things in the beginning or…you could run through the possibilities.
In other words, God is not so great that he can’t understand us. He’s so great that he can. His infinince and immanence are the counterbalance to his transcendence, not that there’s any kind of tension here. That’s just who God is. We can look at him and speak of his transcendence, or we can look and speak of his immanence, but it’s the same mind of God. It’s just so great that we cannot understand.
“My thoughts are not your thoughts,” he says in words to Israel. They’re both true at the same time, and they’re true with regard to counting anything in particular, like three persons, one God. They’re also true when it comes to counting years, months, days, hours. To read the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, which I did lately in John in my daily Bible reading, you keep running into the third hour, the sixth hour…
Emily: Because the timeline matters.
Greg: Yes, it does. We’re telling a real story. We’re going to come back to this I believe next week. Let me just do a commercial for the next time, because what happens if you don’t have a timeline? Then you don’t have sequenced events, and if you don’t have sequenced events you don’t have a story.
I’ve done this before and I’ll do it again. “So there was this shepherd boy named David, and he killed a giant, and then Noah took all of the animals into the ark, two by two, and Peter tried to walk on the water and slipped, for God so loved the world, and Jesus is coming back again, so the baby was born in Bethlehem of Judea, and God created the world in six days, and then Abraham tried to sacrifice his son. There you go. There’s a story.”
Emily: No, no.
Greg: Does it matter whether Frodo throws the ring in at the beginning or the end? Whether Elizabeth first loves Darcy or first resents him? Does that affect anything in the rest of the story, do you think?
Bryan: Although as an extreme quibble I will say that technically Frodo did not throw the ring into the lava. Just saying.
Greg: Yeah, he thought about it for a long time. But see, even there we’re talking about a sequence of events, and if we don’t have that sequence we don’t have a story.
Now, again anticipating next time, we’re going to give our own lives. I’m getting old enough now that my children keep worrying about me contracting dementia. It turns out my daughter Emily has tracked down my birth father, who is in a care facility for people with dementia, so that kind of stirred up concerns a little bit.
What happens when you can’t remember the story of your life? Was it “I got married and then the first baby came? Or the first baby came and then I got married?” Do you think that affects the story of your life somehow? “Did I go to war and then I got married? Did I work first for Boeing or for NASA?”
You start going through these things, and if you can’t sequence them you don’t know the story of your life and you don’t know who you are, so we’re going to be talking next week about identity, but here we’re talking about the identity of God’s covenant people, and we’re talking about that coherent story that is the Bible, that is redemptive history, real history. It just happens to focus upon God’s plan of redemption.
Emily: I think we should point out that there are a lot of godly people who would disagree with us on this, who believe in an older earth or at least a stretched out timeline from the genealogies and such.
Greg: Yeah, and there’s a difference between saying, “None of this is historical. It’s all some kind of literary rearranging of concepts that has no connection to real history,” and saying, “I don’t like the way you’re interpreting connections between events A and B, because I don’t think that’s how the numbers should be handled.”
A hermeneutical argument can simply be an exegetical argument. “Let’s look and see what the Bible says about these numbers,” and as long as we’re willing to do that, that’s fair enough. As I said earlier, even when you look at the Bible’s timeline, there are points where very godly men have disagreed, but they tend to be disagreements that amount to a couple hundred years there, or twenty years there, or fifty years there. The genealogies, the chronologies, the reginal data of the kings of Israel and Judah at one or two points is extremely difficult to follow.
Then there’s discussion about the 430 years that reach from Abraham to Moses. Paul says it’s 430 years from the promise to the giving of the law, but if you read what he seems to be quoting in Exodus, the sojourning of the children of Israel who sojourned in Egypt was 430 years, that makes it sound like their time in Egypt was 430 years. Those aren’t exactly reconcilable on that premise, so that throws you back on comparing scripture with scripture, in some cases looking at the original Greek or Hebrew and seeing how the verses can be interpreted legitimately. This is all within the framework of ordinary biblical scholarship.
Emily: Or reading a book.
Greg: Yeah. There’s the possibility that maybe I didn’t read it right. But what happens too often – and we’re all guilty of this to some extent, and part of growing older is learning to disassociate yourself from it – is we bought into a lot that we were told by our favorite books, by our favorite pastors, by our favorite teachers.
This is true of pastors and theologians, and sometimes those people that we admire so much were wrong about this or that. Sometimes they were wrong about a lot, and sometimes it was just one or two minor things, and we tend to be very loyal or it never occurs to us to question them, sometimes because we have more important things to worry about.
As we grow older we tend to find a little more time to say, “Wait. I remember my pastor saying this. What exactly is the evidence?” And if we have time and we care enough, we go back and check it out, and sometimes we don’t have time. Again, that’s another thing that we can honestly reckon with, and we always should.
Anytime you’re going to debate someone on a theological issue, you’re not simply talking about scripture. You’re talking about everybody your debating partner knows, trusts, and loves, who believe what he does, because if he admits he’s wrong it’s not just that he’s wrong but his pastor is wrong, his parents are wrong, the church he grew up is wrong, his favorite authors who built so much into his life are wrong. That’s hard and that’s human, and we need to have great patience and humility with that.
There’s a time to push for, “No, you’re going to be a teacher. You need to deal with this.” I would say, “Yeah, how about those Dodgers?” Let it go. Not every argument needs to be to the death.
But then perhaps finally, there is the danger of a latent Gnosticism in Protestant Christianity that emphasizes the heart, the mind, the spirit, the emotions, religious sentiment, and downplays the body, economics, politics, law, and geography and clocks and things like that. Sometimes that sneaks up on us and we don’t realize it, but sometimes we do realize it and we just say, “Well yeah, that’s not all that important.” And that favorite fallback that this Life Application Bible used – “But does it really affect any doctrine pertaining to salvation?”
You can understand why people would go there. I would hope we can also understand why that’s not a good place to go, because we’re focusing upon the saving of souls as the most important thing the Bible has to give us, and I think we have to insist that it’s not. The glory of God, the integrity of the Trinity, the goodness of God, that’s the most important thing. If God is not truth in a way that we understand and can talk about truth, then we’re going to lose everything, including the salvation of souls. If Jesus didn’t rise again on the third day, we’re all lost.
The things that can creep up and try to smother that can begin way, way back in time; in fact, at the beginning of the world. How many of the things that we’re fighting right now have to do with things surrounding the creation, the relationship of men and women, the relationship between a man and woman in marriage in particular? These are things that happened on the sixth day of creation – or did they?
Was it as Jesus said in the beginning, or was it, ya know, a few million years into the process when one of our ancestors became sentient enough for God to grant him the image of God, and then marriage? What are we dealing with here?
So even when there are good intentions, we sometimes have to kind of gently slap the hand and say, “No, you don’t see where this is leading. Let me try to show you,” but we should be ladies and gentlemen about it, certainly.
And then there are the neo orthodox who just really don’t believe the Bible, and there you draw the sword of the Spirit and start slashing.
There have been at least two scholars in fairly recent years – recent compared with my lifetime – who have faced the Egyptian problem and tried to come up with a solution. The first was Immanuel Velikovsky. Just to say the name in most scientific circles is to get weird looks and boos and hoots because, frankly, Velikovsky was a little weird. He had all kinds of ideas about the evolution of the solar system and how the planets got to be where they are, and where Venus came from, and how all of this fits into the miracles that happened in the Bible. He was just a little imaginative, shall we say.
Emily: Which again, we’ve said it before, when it comes to theology, imaginative is not a compliment.
Greg: No, it’s not in theology, but sometimes in science it can be, but only if it gets checked out thoroughly by normal processes that scientists ought to go through.
But alongside of that, he wrote a book called Ages in Chaos where he looks at the problem of this long chronology, and invoking to some extent his weird ideas on cosmology and astrophysics. Nonetheless he makes a very simple suggestion, which Egyptologists were already beginning to use some. “What if the dynasties overlap? What if they’re not all in succession?”
Then he supplied his idea of how they could be shown to overlap in a way that would significantly reduce the timeline and bring it more into line with what the Bible says, although he was not an orthodox Christian by any means, and begin to make sense out of the ancient world. It also eliminated some of the dark spots or dark ages in the Egyptian timeline. He was ignored to death because he was just too weird and people didn’t even want to think about him.
Sometime later when I was a young man in 1971, an Adventist scholar, Dr. Donovan Courville, produced a two-volume set called Exodus Problem. I don’t remember if he makes any reference to Velikovsky or not. Mostly he sets out doing the same sort of thing, and again suggesting ways that these dynasties could be shown to either overlap or, in some cases, some are not actually dynasties. They’re a list of local rulers under a particular Pharaoh.
Again, his overall work is to shorten the timeline of Egypt so that it fits in with what the Bible tells us should be happening, and in the process he does push and pull things so that 490 years before Solomon, 1445 BC, is no longer a high peak in Egyptian history. It now becomes a period where something like the exodus is possible.
In fact, he manages to come up with a manuscript that’s fairly well-known, but there was just confusion as to where it might fit and what it might be talking about. But if Courville is right and it does fit there, these are some of the things it says. It’s called the Ipuwer Papyrus or Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage.
Plague is throughout the land. Forsooth, the river is blood, yet men drink of it. Forsooth, gates, columns, and walls are consumed by fire. Forsooth, men are few. He who places his brother in the ground is everywhere. Forsooth, the desert is throughout the land. The nomes are laid waste. A foreign tribe from abroad has come to Egypt. Forsooth, gold, lapis lazuli, silver, malachite, carnelian and bronze, stone of Yebhet are fastened on the necks of female slaves. Indeed, grain has perished on every side. People are stripped of clothes, spices, and oil. Everybody says, “There is none.”
It would be strange if the exodus left no mark at all on Egyptian culture, history, and records. This is only one thing, but it sure sounds an awful lot like the exodus.
Emily: Specifically the jewelry on slaves’ necks. That’s a little too specific.
Greg: Yes, isn’t it. And the river is blood and yet people still drink from it.
Neither Velikovsky and Courville have the last word on this. There’s still a lot to do, but one of the main challenges has been getting historians and Egyptologists to actually rethink their basic presuppositions, and, as we all know, that’s always a hard thing. There are things that you take as your givens. You were taught them in kindergarten, whether it be archeological kindergarten or whatever. In your first day of class, “Here’s your timeline, people. Know it and work from it for the rest of your careers.” It’s hard to go back and say, “No, I’ve been wrong about everything.”
A little bit after that, about 20 years later, Peter James and some other scholars – as far as I know, all of them secular scholars; they don’t claim any kind of Christian testimony in their book – produced another book called Centuries of Darkness, again to challenge the chronology of ancient Egypt.
Their focus is later on, after Israel was well into the land, so they don’t really talk about the exodus and all that, but the conclusion they come to is that Egyptian chronology is 300 years too long, and their solution? “Let’s try overlapping the dynasties. It will probably shrink it back to where it needs to be.”
So we’ve got our weird wacky cosmologist. We’ve got our Seventh Day Adventist, a very staid quiet scholar who didn’t get much publicity. And now we’ve got a team of very competent secular scholars who can actually get published in the mainstream, and they’re all saying, “Guys, why don’t we rethink this?”
There’s one line Peter James’ book where he says this. “The dates the Old Testament gives, even those for the historical periods which are potentially useful to archeology, have been altered, mangled, or rejected in arbitrary fashion. It seems that the Bible has suffered from this kind of hypercritical treatment simply because it is the Bible. A similar approach would never have been taken with the sacred literature of other ancient Near Eastern societies.”
That’s the closest that book ever gets to any acknowledgement of Christianity, but they have the guts to say, “You know, would we have treated any other significant manuscript evidence the way we’ve treated the Bible? No. Then why are we treating the Bible that way? Could it be because it is the Bible?”
So we’re back to hermeneutics, to the dangers of Gnosticism, the danger of pretending that God can’t, won’t, or doesn’t count, that he won’t communicate with us in numbers or in calendar history. If we’re going to have any kind of long-term effect in history, in archeology, in sociology, we have to keep insisting that what God says is what God intends to say, and it is understandable.
We’re not allowed to brush it away because we’re not comfortable with it, because our science hasn’t gotten as far as the Bible already has. We need to insist that inerrancy and infallibility apply to every word of God because, if we don’t, it’s an issue of salvation at stake here.
I think, Emily, you said this at the beginning, or at least you said it when we first started talking. Does it matter whether or not God can tell us the truth about anything? He talked to us about the mysteries of heaven, but he can’t talk to us about earthly things? Didn’t Jesus say something like that to Nicodemus? “If I have told you of earthly things and you believe not, how will you believe me if I tell you of heavenly things?”
Later on to the Pharisees he says, “I don’t accuse you. There’s another one who accuses you, Moses, in whom you trust, for if you had believed his words you would have believed me.”
We don’t get to pick what we’re going to believe. We have to believe the Bible as the Bible.
Emily: Bryan, you’ve been looking pensive. Do you have thoughts that you’d like to share?
Bryan: I’m really just absorbing, because this is not my area of expertise, but I agree.
Emily: Well, this is not my area of expertise, either, so Greg, thank you for sharing some of your expertise with us.
Greg: You are welcome. I’m going to throw something else at you again, previews of coming attractions. I don’t know if this is the first line, but it’s one of the first lines of the book, so see if you recognize it. It’s the beginning of a speech someplace in the first chapter. “The introduction of our Ford’s Model T, chosen as the opening date of a new era. All crosses have their tops cut off and became T’s. At the same time, all the museums were destroyed and all the statues taken down.” Sound familiar?
Emily: Yup.
Greg: Okay, she’s got it. Bryan, do you recognize it?
Bryan: No or maybe.
Emily: I could not finish this book, to be frank. I have not yet finished it. I read about 50 pages.
Bryan: Is it Brave New World?
Greg: It’s Brave New World. But notice the Model T becomes the place for starting a new dating system, and they destroyed the museums and the books and the records so they can rewrite history from the year 0.
Emily: It’s like the French Revolution.
Greg: Like the French Revolution, so those are some of the things we’re going to talk about. Why do you do that? Why do you erase your past? Why do you restart the calendar? What are you really after? And what does it have to do with your own sense of identity, your community – the people that you have some kind of vital relationship with – and freedoms? We’ll stop there and we’ll pick it up next time.
Bryan: There’s probably something to do, at least with the restarting the date – everyone wants to make their own new world order. They’re forgetting that we already established that with the birth of Christ. That was the start of the new age.
Greg: Why do so many people hate the BC/AD dating system?
Emily: Yeah, why is it a big deal?
Thanks guys so much for this conversation. I wish it could go on a lot longer. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. Please send us an email if you’d like. Haltingtowardzion@gmail.com is our email address.
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Bryan: I have to say, don’t follow me on Twitter. I don’t want to be Twitter famous. We’re good.
Emily: All right, don’t follow us on Twitter, but do Like our Facebook page, Halting Toward Zion. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next week.