We got Satan riding around on a horse serpent or something.
It's a cartoon!
It's one Targum written two thousand years after the fact.
"Well, we're going to go there for truth."
Wasn't there some rabbinic speculation that Adam was both male and female
and then split into male with Eve being the female?
I'm not a master of rabbinic material, so I'm going to say there probably is.
The rabbis speculate on everything at some point.
But let me be really clear: I don't really care what the rabbis say,
because the rabbis are speculating in some cases, centuries,
in some cases millennium after the biblical text,
a thousand years or more later than the biblical text.
We get enamored with rabbis, why?
It would be like somebody commenting on, a thousand years after the Declaration
of Independence was written, and saying that it was written by Martians or something.
Well, you can speculate whatever you want, but that's all it is.
You're commenting on something a thousand years earlier.
It was produced a thousand years before you were ever born.
How does that make you an authority on it?
Well, just because the rabbis know Hebrew, look, you can go to Jerusalem today
and hand a six year old a Hebrew Bible and the six year old can read it.
The six year old better not be doing your Bible interpretation for you.
"Well, they can sight read it. They can read the Hebrew Bible. Right?"
Well, yeah, they can. Just like your six year old at home can read an English Bible.
Is that your biblical authority now? Your six year old?
I mean, come on. We have to think a little more clearly than this.
The rabbis are writing what they're writing
hundreds and hundreds of years after the fact of the Old Testament.
And they are freewheeling it a lot.
I would challenge you to to actually read what rabbis produce.
They disagree with each other all the time
on basically every page, every subject.
Now, what you want instead of the rabbis,
and this is the revolution in biblical studies that is the Dead Sea Scrolls.
OK, before the Dead Sea Scrolls, people would try to interpret
the New Testament in concert with the rabbinic writings,
even though the rabbinic writings are centuries later than even the New Testament.
It's medieval Judaism, the rabbis are medieval.
Let's let's get that in our heads: The rabbis are medievalists.
That's what they are, or later; medieval to modern, that's who they are.
So, before the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was thought that, well, these are
the oldest Jewish guys that we can sort of tap into
that might give us some clue as to what's going on in the days of Jesus.
OK, when the Dead Sea Scrolls came around that it just blew that apart,
because now you actually have material written by Jews that is contemporary
with the New Testament, and that reawakened people to be reading
Second Temple period Jewish literature generally.
Material that was older than the New Testament, prior to the time of Jesus.
It's not getting into the Old Testament yet, but it gives you the Jewish culture
in between the testamental periods. Maybe we should be reading that stuff because
those people are living just before, acentury or two before Jesus showed up,
and during Jesus and the apostles.
Maybe that's better material for us to reference,
to understand our New Testament as opposed to the rabbis.
And you know what? It is. It is better.
It gives you more of the context, the actual context,
as opposed to something that's coming centuries later. So let's get off the rabbis.
And I'm not here saying that rabbinic material has nothing to contribute.
You know, a good scholarly commentary, you're going to have a guy writing
or a woman writing the commentary who knows the difference that I just articulated.
They're going to know what's contemporary and what isn't.
And if they get into the into the rabbinic material, the rabbinic material
might be something valuable because it's in concert with
the material that is contemporary.
In other words, something that the rabbis were traking, you know, barking up the correct tree,
but we know that because of contemporary material,
not because of something that some guy that lived 500 years later just popped into his head
and that becomes his commentary on the passage.
That's true. And also a lot of modern speculation is rabbinic speculation
like Cain being fathered by the serpent and stuff like that.
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, you know, 800 years after the New Testament.
1800 years after the after Genesis, if you take mosaic authorship.
Now you're pushing two millennia later, two thousand years later.
We got we got Satan riding around on a horse serpent or something.
You know, it's a cartoon!
It's one Targum written two thousand years after the fact.
"Well, we're going to go there for truth."
You're... OK. There are a lot of things I could say about that, but that's really foolish.