What we're going to talk about today was sort of looked at as forbidden knowledge.
There were certain passages in the Old Testament that you shouldn't be reading.
And you shouldn't be studying without a rabbi with you
to steer you from one direction to the other.
To give you the standard interpretation or denial
of what the text was actually saying.
And so there I am, in a room full of 40 or 50, senior citizens, they're all Jewish,
and I'm going through the Godhead in the Old Testament.
And none of them had ever heard of it.
I had people in there whose fathers were rabbis and cantors.
They had never heard of this.
And so, they were fascinated, because part of the class
I took them through Jewish texts in the intertestamental period,
as to how this idea was part of Judaism. How it developed.
And then, of course, it was a segue to understanding Christianity.
And they were fascinated.
So, just trust me on this, I've met many Jews since that had no idea
that this was part of their theology once.
I have since discovered, as an academic, this was actually part of my dissertation,
that what we're going to talk about today was sort of looked at as forbidden knowledge.
There were certain passages in the Old Testament that you shouldn't be reading.
And you shouldn't be studying without a rabbi with you
to steer you from one direction to the other.
To give you the standard interpretation or denial
of what the text was actually saying.
So we're going to jump in; one of these passages is Genesis 19:24.
And let's just click out to that. This is the Sodom and Gomorrah story.
And I'm going to shut off my interlinear panel
and make this a little bigger for the camera.
And it says here, verse 24, "Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah
sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven."
Now, what is odd about that verse?
It has, let me look at it, "the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah
sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven."
The Lord is raining down fire from the Lord.
You have Yahweh twice in the same verse,
and they look like two different characters.
And Jewish thinkers and readers, you know, they saw this.
And this became part of what would later become known as the two powers in heaven.
Here's another one, Exodus 15:3. This is the song of Moses
after they go through the Red Sea. And we have this line in here;
"The Lord Yahweh is a man of war; the Lord is his name."
So even that, you know, Lord is his name. But the Lord is a man of war.
Since other Old Testament passages had Yahweh, not as a man very clearly,
and sort of a transcendent being, living in the heaven somewhere.
This verse sort of stood out in intertestamental Judaism, as significant
as portraying the notion that Yahweh would come to earth, in human form.
And we're going to see how this fit into other passages in a moment.
But they looked at this and thought, well, this is explicit.
So there's Yahweh on Earth as a man, whenever that happens,
but that doesn't mean that Yahweh still not in heaven and everywhere.
So apparently there's two; one in human form and one not.
And you see how this would stimulate their thinking.
Daniel 7:9-10, was actually a crucial passage.
And there's a lot of rabbinic discussion,
a lot of intertestamental discussion on this.
The passage reads, "as I looked, thrones, (notice the plural), were set in place
(were placed) and the Ancient of Days took his seat."
Now we know who the Ancient of Days is, this is God. So God is seated now.
"His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like wool,
his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire."
This is language drawn from Ezekiel 1
where it's very clearly God on his throne chariot.
And so there's no ambiguity here. This is God.
"A stream of fire issued and came out from before him",
so on and so forth. "The court sat in judgment and the books were opened."
Now you say, Well, what's the big deal? Well, if you go down to verse 13,
"I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a Son of Man, and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him." So there's a second figure here.
They're both in the same verse, Son of Man, Ancient of Days,
but it's to the Son of Man that everlasting kingship is given.
And we're going to talk about the description of coming on the clouds in heaven.
Because the Jewish community knew that that was an epithet,
a title that you would give only to deity, and only to Yahweh.
But Yahweh is already in the passage. So who's this other guy?
And he's the Son of Man. In other words, one like a human, a human being.
So these are three fundamental passages.
And we're going to come back to Daniel 7 later,
that really contributed to this idea. Now if you're interested in it,
the fundamental work written in 1977 on this is Alan Segal's "Two Powers in Heaven".
Segal was a Jew, he taught rabbinics at Brandeis for many years,
he's now deceased.
But what he wrote the book for was to answer a simple question;
How did we lose this? How did we lose this doctrine?
Like, what happened to change our theology?
Because he was a student, not only of the intertestamental material,
but he was a student of rabbinics and he knew that this was a discussion,
and he knew earlier it had been an accepted part of Jewish theology.
So he wanted to know like, what happened.
And his whole book is devoted to understanding
when the Jewish community changed their theology, and why.
So if you have a Jewish friend who's used to reading academic material,
this is a great book to give them. It's by a Jew, it's not by a Christian, it's by a Jew.