Under the umbrella of Providence, that God is taking oversight over this,
and this is human activity under the providence of God.
Big deal. I mean, I would expect place names to change because
when people read the stories they're not going to know where the places were.
How about divergences in synoptic content; usually we think of the Synoptic Gospels,
Matthew, Mark and Luke. But in the Old Testament, there are passages that are the same,
or at least discuss the same thing, Torah regulations.
So here got the rules for the Passover.
Exodus 12. «This month shall be for you the beginning of months.», so on and so forth.
You go... «It shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell all the congregation
of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man shall take a lamb
according to their fathers' houses, a lamb for a household.
And if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor
shall take according to the number of persons; according to what each
can eat you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish...
a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats,
and you shall keep it until the fourteenth day...
when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight...
take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel...
They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire;
with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it.
Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted,
its head with its legs and its inner parts.»
They're supposed to do this at home and there are instructions.
Well, if you go to Deuteronomy,
Deuteronomy 16.
«You may not offer the Passover sacrifice within any of your towns
that the Lord your God is giving you, but at the place that the Lord your God will choose,
to make his name dwell in it.» Where was that? Where is it going to be?
Jerusalem, okay, you're not allowed to do it at home.
«There you shall offer the Passover sacrifice, in the evening at sunset...
you shall cook it and eat it at the place that the Lord your God will choose.
And in the morning you shall turn and go to your tents. For six days», so on and so forth.
You shall cook it (ū·ḇiš·šal·tā), you know what that means in Hebrew?
That's the word for boil in the other passage,
the thing you weren't supposed to do, now you're supposed to do it.
Or it's okay. Now, you can look at that. And there are different
historical circumstances intended for Exodus and Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy is looking forward to when they're in the land, that's legit.
No problem, actually, if you think about what's going on the passage;
this is what we do now, before we have a temple. This is what we do later. Easy.
That's a problem for mental telepathy and whispering,
because shouldn't God have known?
You know, like, maybe you could use some other vocabulary.
So people later on don't think this is a contradiction.
Again, there're just things like this, and this is a small example, where
there are reasons why things are done the way they do.
I mean, I could take into the Torah, where place names are changed.
If you listen to the Exodus series, you've already gotten some of this in the podcast.
But it'll talk about a place, which used to be called, or its former name was.
And both things, the former, and the latter will be in the Torah.
And if Moses was supposed to have written this through mental telepathy or whatever,
that doesn't make any sense, because Moses is living after the time
when the name was changed, or before. Which one is it? Is it before or after?
If he's before, then he doesn't need to do that.
If it's after, why does he change all of them?
Again, you just run into things like this.
That if you're looking at the text as something that can be handled down the line,
under the umbrella of Providence, that God is taking oversight over this,
and this is human activity under the providence of God.
Big deal. I mean, I would expect place names to change because when
people read the stories they are not going to know where the places were.
A 1000 years later, they don't know where this places is or that places is
because its name had changed. They're never going to be able to find it.
Their parents won't know. Hey, our forefathers camped out at this place.
No, they didn't. There's no place that exists like that, you know.
So the scribes, the believing community will do things to the text
to editorially update it so that the readers living 500 years later,
will know what in the world is talking about. It's perfectly understandable.
Unless you're in this model where we paid attention to God whispering the words
and you can't touch it now. It makes the easy difficult.
It makes the answerable a target, and it just shouldn't be that way.