Lecture: Biblical Series IX: The Call to Abraham

[Music] So I've been thinking this week about doing this once a month on a continuing basis. So I think if I do that, I think it'll be here, although it's harder to rent this theater during the academic year. But if it isn't here, it'll be somewhere else.

Because I'd like to continue doing this, I'm learning an awful lot from doing it. Once a month would really be good because then I could really do the background work, and I could probably do that for a couple of years. Because obviously, this isn't going very quickly, but that's okay. You know, I mean it shouldn't go any faster than it can go, and that's how it seems to me anyways.

So this has been a very steep learning curve for me with regards to these stories because I didn't understand them very well. I've got better at using the resources online to help me do my background investigation. I have a lot of books. Some of you may have noticed that online, I posted a conversation I had with Jonathan Pasio and his brother Matthew. I hope it's Matthew; the name escaped me so badly, but I believe that's right. He just finished a book on the Bible.

So I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about these stories, trying to understand what they're about. And then there's all these commentaries. There's a great site, I think it's called Bible Hub, that has every single verse of the Bible listed there. And then with each verse, there are like they've aggregated ten commentaries from over the last 400 years.

So there's like a dense page on every line, and that's one of the things that's really interesting about this book too. It's aggregated so much commentary that it's much bigger than it looks. The book is much bigger than it looks, and so it's been very interesting to become familiar with those too. The fact that this site is set up with all the commentaries split up by verses means you can rapidly compare the commentaries and get a sense of how people have interpreted this over at least several hundred years, but of course much longer than that.

Because the people who wrote the commentaries were, of course, reading things that were older than that, so that's been very, very interesting. So last week we talked about a couple of things. We talked about how you might understand the idea of a Divine encounter, and then we also paralleled that with the idea that God disappears in the Old Testament. He bows out as the stories progress.

That seems to be an emergent property of the sequencing of the stories, right? Because all the books were written by independent people, different people, and then they were aggregated by other people. The narrative continuity is some kind of emergent property that's a consequence of this interaction between people, readers, and writers over centuries.

It's strange that given that there are also multiple coherent narratives that unite it. You know, it's really not that easy to understand that, but it does at least seem to be the case. And so the third thing we talked about was that as God bows out, so to speak, the individual personality seems of the characters that are involved—the human characters that are involved—seems to become more and more developed.

It isn't exactly clear what that... I mean, what it means is that God steps away and man steps forward. That's what it means, but why it's arranged like that or the ultimate significance of that is by no means clear. And so, Abraham, who we're going to concentrate on today, is quite a well-developed character.

I would say there are multiple endings and beginnings in the biblical stories. The most important ending, I suppose, is the ending of the Garden of Paradise and the disenchantment of the world, and the sending forth of Adam and Eve into history—right into the future—into a motive being that has a future as part of it and that has...