Read the Bible Like Music — with Alastair Roberts

[00:00:00] Welcome to Thatll Preach. We have Alastair Roberts back on the show. This might be your third or fourth time. You might be the most recurring. At least the third. Yeah, at least. Yeah, yeah. So you're a familiar face and so grateful for you to come back on the show. Always enjoy our conversation. So thanks for joining us from New York City. Good to be back with you.

[00:00:21] So what I want to talk about today is a book that you wrote. You wrote this a while ago. This might even be pre-COVID, is that right? Something like that, I don't know. Yeah, 2018 I think it was published. Yeah, but I just opened this up and I realized you sent this a signed copy. So I feel very special there. But Echoes of Exodus, you wrote this with Andrew Wilson, one of your friends and occasional co-hosts, I guess, on Mere Fidelity, whenever he makes it on.

[00:00:50] And this is a very accessible book, but I think a very helpful book that isn't just about the Exodus story. It's really about how to read the scriptures, I think. And so I'm just curious. You got the title Echoes of Exodus, Tracing Themes of Redemption Through Scripture. You talk a lot about narrative, about reading narratives. What is the narrative behind this book? How did this book come about? What inspired you to write it?

[00:01:16] What was that process like that got you interested in writing on this topic? I've always been interested in biblical typology. And on one level, you have the sort of theory, the principles by which you're reading texts. It's quite another to show that actually is really rewarding in practice, that you can follow such a way of reading. And it will consistently bear fruit and throughout the biblical text.

[00:01:44] So it's not just something that you can apply to a few texts here and there or books here and there. It's something that the whole scripture will... That sort of reading is something that the whole scripture rewards. Now, I've always wanted to have some sort of project that I take on over a Lenten period.

[00:02:04] And one of the things that I took on several years back was 40 Days of Exodus, which was the idea every single day I would write some reflection going through the whole of the biblical narrative, reflecting upon themes of Exodus within a particular part of scripture and taking us through from the very beginning in Genesis to the very end of scripture and Revelation and showing how this is a theme that pervades the whole scripture. It's not just the book of Exodus.

[00:02:33] It's not just certain parts of the Pentateuch. It is everywhere. And it provides, in many respects, a sort of thematic backbone for understanding the entire text. And so this was a project that I started during the period of my PhD, which was on the subject of the Red Sea Crossing and Christian baptism. And so I had these questions of biblical typology and the Exodus in the background of my work anyway.

[00:02:58] So I thought this is a good way to take on a Lenten project that dovetails well with the sort of work that I need to do for my PhD. And so I started on this project. It went really well for about 15 days, and then it started to become far more intense. I was writing 5,000 words a day on this project, and I realized this is becoming unwieldy. I'm not going to be able to finish this. So I had lots of notes for the entire text.

[00:03:28] And then I largely abandoned the project about halfway through, but had done much of the work and kept studying the text as I was going through. But I didn't write up full posts on the subject. My friend, Andrew Wilson, and co-host, we often interacted on social media and, of course, in the podcast.

[00:03:50] We'd not yet met in person, but he was fascinated when he came across my series of posts at a later date and read through them and just found them incredibly helpful. And so suggested that what we should do is write a book together. I was not able to finish the project, but I had literally 150,000 words worth of notes. Unbelievable. He suggested that he write it up in a popularized form.

[00:04:19] And so he knocked it down to around 30,000 words that were very readable and accessible. And that's the book. So Andrew is really responsible for the process of making this into a completed project. I had all the material, but it just was not anything like the sort of accessible text that I think people will find very helpful. And that's largely Andrew and his work.

[00:04:46] You need to release the full cut, the director's cut. We got to see that. Maybe at some point. That'd be great. That'd be great. I'm just curious about what a thing that you set out to do, writing 5,000 words or something like that. I mean, what was your study habit like? I know that you posted before all the commentaries on your shelf that you use for the meditations you did.

[00:05:15] But in my mind, I'm like, are you looking at the text? Are you making notes? And then you're reading all the sections in those books? What is your study regimen like for that Lenten period? It really depends on the particular project that I'm doing. For that project, I had done most of the reading and study already as part of just my research for my PhD. And then before that, so this was familiar material to me.

[00:05:42] I was largely trying to metabolize it and express it in a form that helped me to join all the dots. Because one of the things I find is that as you're studying something for an intense period of time and an extended way, so you're going through the entirety of the Bible within 40 days and writing all of that stuff down,

[00:06:05] connections emerge that would not if you're just studying lots of passages discreetly and individually over a longer period of time. It's the condensed period of time that allows texts that you would not necessarily relate to come into correspondence. So that was the experience of it. I wasn't largely doing the research while I was writing it. I'd done the research and then I was just writing it up. For my biblical reflections, I did a lot more of the research alongside the actual writing.

[00:06:35] But again, I'd done much of the research already. I've spent years getting into commentaries and studying biblical theology, so I could speak on any one of these texts pretty much at the drop of a hat. But actually getting into real detail requires some refreshment of my understanding of the material and then also getting into different commentary treatments of the text.

[00:07:03] So what I'd do for my biblical reflections was to go through my existing notes, many of these texts I'd written on already or spoken on in some form, and then I would combine that with several hours each day just going into the commentaries. So for that period of 2020 to 2021, that two-year period,

[00:07:28] I was doing probably about nine hours work a day, reading commentaries, writing notes, and then recording. But much of the work had been done previously. That is a lot of dedication. But I think one of the things that you talked about is when you're reading these large chunks of Scripture and you're constantly kind of going through the entirety of the Bible, these connections appear that you can't get unless you're constantly being inundated with the grand story over and over again

[00:07:58] and seeing these books come together. I mean, the title is Echoes of Exodus. And that word echoes is a very interesting phrase. Why echoes? What does that mean? Yes, the term is one that I first really came across in the work of Richard Hayes. I'd encountered it before, but it was really Richard Hayes and his work Echoes of Scripture and the Letters of Paul.

[00:08:23] He's subsequently to that he wrote Echoes of Scripture and the Gospels, both superb books. But he discusses the way in which intertextual phenomena work in Scripture, whereby we have on occasions direct citations, as it's said in the book of Isaiah the prophet, for instance. It's a direct citation, and it will be connected with some text of Isaiah that's, for instance,

[00:08:48] when Jesus talks about teaching in parables, he cites from Isaiah chapter 6, hearing they shall hear and not understand, etc., or seeing they shall see and not perceive. That text is one that is taken as a sort of paradigm for understanding the ministry of Christ. You have it again recorded at the end of Acts 28. But that sort of text is directly cited. And so there's no doubt that Jesus and Luke wanted you to notice that connection,

[00:09:18] because Isaiah is explicitly cited. On other occasions, there are allusions where a text is very clearly in the background, and there's a reference made to it, but it's not explicitly pointed out in the way that a citation would point it out. You can see, for instance, some of the allusions to Old Testament passages of, for instance, Christ coming on the clouds. You might think back to Daniel chapter 7 there,

[00:09:47] or you might think about the beginning of John's Gospel. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So very clearly an allusion back to Genesis chapter 1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. So you've got a citation, you've got an allusion, and then you've got echoes, which are a lot more subtle. An echo is not directly pointed out. You'll often find them in a sort of a combination of echoes.

[00:10:14] Maybe it's a particular turn of phrase, or maybe it's some detail that's very distinctive, or maybe it's some thematic thing that connects to objects. Whatever it is, it can often operate at that level where it's not entirely clear whether this is a matter of the author's intention, or whether it's just something that you recognize as the reader, some resonance between two things. And that resonance may be a real one, it may be imagined,

[00:10:44] but that resonance is often an experience of an echo. Now, when we're reading through Scripture, we do have the explicit citations. But much of what we're dealing with is these more subtle allusions and echoes. And my book on Exodus is very much exploring the allusions and echoes and how they relate certain stories together. Certain gives us a paradigm within which to think about salvation, etc.

[00:11:13] And it brings texts into correspondence, not just the explicit texts that are referenced, but the broader passages that surround those texts. This is something that Richard Hayes is very helpful on as he talks about echoes or metalepsis. The way in which, when you allude to a particular text, what is evoked is not merely that specific set of words or the immediate verse from which that comes.

[00:11:43] But the broader prophetic context or the psalmic context or the context that you might find within some Old Testament narrative. And so you're in the process bringing that text into correspondence with the text that you're reading in the New Testament. And you can see there's a sort of movement of illumination between the two sparks fly between them.

[00:12:10] Now, that is not something that's exclusive to the intertestamental relationship. You'll find it within the Old Testament itself. There are places, for instance, in the story of 1 Samuel, where it's very clear the story of David, Saul, Jonathan, Michael, all these characters. It's playing off the relationships between Jacob, Esau, Rachel, Laban, and other characters.

[00:12:37] And that sort of interplay is alluded to and echoed, but it's never explicitly cited. But if you have your ears open and you're attentive, you will hear these echoes. And holding those two texts alongside each other, suddenly things start to be illuminated. The subtlety to me is what's really fascinating about this approach.

[00:13:00] And I think you've even done some Q&As about this, about does this type of reading lend itself to this sort of interpretive pluralism where you just sort of become the wax nose, you know. What I find is what you're talking about is exactly right. I mean, they're the exact, you know, this was to fulfill the word of the Lord, right? You've got the exact kind of correspondence in Gospels of explicit citations of the Old Testament. Then you have illusions, like you said, Son of Man, the Daniel imagery.

[00:13:28] It's a little more sophisticated, but those you can still do. I mean, you could read the explicit connection and go, okay, I get it. You don't really have to flip back to the Old Testament. If you want extra credit, you can, but you kind of get it. It seems like the illusions, you might need to flip back to the exact passage. But this you're talking about, it's like you almost don't realize it until you're kind of taking in all of these narratives and then it becomes an instinct, an intuition.

[00:13:55] And sometimes I think about this where the concern about the theological controls, I think there's a legitimacy to that. Part of it is kind of like, well, how do you know that this music is drawing different themes? And you're like, I don't know. You just have an intuition. It's just you listen to enough music and it's just, it's there. You understand it. It resonates. The resonance isn't something you can sort of make into an equation. It's something that is just, it just becomes apparent by your familiarity.

[00:14:24] And so that gets to the musical metaphor, which I think this is probably my favorite part of the book, which is right there in the beginning, kind of framing things. But you advocate for this sort of this musical metaphor for reading scripture. How do we read scripture musically? It's one that I originally encountered in the work of Jeremy Begby. He talks about music for theology. So we often might talk about a theology of music.

[00:14:54] How do we think about music as Christians? And he's suggesting that we can use music for theology, that we can treat music as a sort of conceptual root metaphor through which we gain purchase upon theological and biblical concepts. And this can be done in a number of different ways. One of the things that is particularly powerful about music is the way that it explores time.

[00:15:20] When we think about time, we tend to think about time according to the concept of clock time, where you have sequential moment, discrete moments that can be measured out and divided. And it's the ticking of the clock and maybe the chiming of the clock on the hour or something like that. That's the way that we think about time.

[00:15:44] Whereas when you're thinking about music, music gives you a far richer way of understanding time. You can think, for instance, about the experience of listening to a piece of music and the way that the end of the piece of music, when the final note has been sounded, that's not actually the end. Even as that note has died on the air, there's a sense in which that note lingers.

[00:16:09] And the experience of that piece of music in its performance is one that requires inhabiting this experience of temporality. And the way in which the note hangs on and colours the moments afterwards is part of how that works. Now, you might think about the thematic relationships within music, where if you're listening to a symphony that explores certain thematic details,

[00:16:37] it will return to an original, an earlier theme at some later part, and there will be a development of that theme, variations upon it. Or you might think about the way that there is tension and then resolution on many different levels of a piece of music. So there can be these larger movements of temporality playing out over the whole symphony. But then there's these smaller movements over the course of a bar.

[00:17:06] Now, when we're reading scripture, it's a similar sort of thing. There are these patterns of temporality that can be explored through the motif of music. Now, music is also something that helps us to understand the relationship of people with texts. You might think about the way that music animates the body, and in animating the body, also animates social bodies. We dance together, for instance.

[00:17:31] Or we might experience the musicality of the body as our bodies are given a sort of template of action by music, because it gives us time that we can keep in time with other people. You might think also about the experience of time as an exploration of occasion. Again, as Jeremy Begby talks about this. There's something of the character of the performance that's always different.

[00:17:58] It's always exploring some different moment in time, some different occasion. And no piece can be performed in the same way twice, because the occasion is always slightly different. And this is a feature of the biblical text, which has its home primarily within the context of the liturgy, which, as moderns, seems strange to us. Our experience of the biblical text is primarily as the Bible that we pull down off the shelf.

[00:18:27] It's the metaphor that we have for it. It's a book, a single book containing all of its contents between two covers. That's a very modern metaphor for the Bible in certain respects. The Bible has not been a thing for most of the history of the Holy Scriptures. Most of the history of the Holy Scriptures was multiple texts or multiple scrolls or multiple codices.

[00:18:50] There was an experience of the text as a handwritten manuscript text, and also as something that is encountered principally in its being read aloud within the congregation, and read aloud in a context where its home was not primarily in the sequential ordering of text within a book, but in the experience of the lectionary, where you have certain books and texts being read alongside each other in a juxtapositional way,

[00:19:21] where you're reading, for instance, the story of Genesis alongside the story, for instance, of John, and you hear these two texts alongside each other, and there's a musical resonance between them that's explored. It's one of the things that good preaching is doing. Good preaching helps us to hear the resonances within the Scriptures,

[00:19:42] and then also to hear the resonances between the Scriptures and the text, as it were, in inverted commas, of our lives. And so we're able to take the insights of the biblical text and see how our lives can be a resonance chamber within which they can be heard in new ways. And so part of what I wanted to do with that motif of the idea of music as a conceptual metaphor

[00:20:09] is to give people conceptual tools to reflect upon Scripture in a way that's a bit more expansive and creative than the ways that they typically do, and also to recognize the importance of thematic elements within Scripture, that Scripture is constantly exploring and developing these motifs, Exodus being one of the chief among them. You might also think about themes of fall or themes of creation.

[00:20:36] Those themes also get included into the Exodus material, but the Exodus motif is one that plays out throughout the biblical text, and music is a good way to think about what's going on when we encounter it. It's a good point about the concept of the Bible as a sort of bounded physical object versus something that was very much alive within the liturgy of the Church. And you've made this point before, how the Scripture is something to be performed.

[00:21:06] You know, I mean, the idea that, you know, and I think that's why the musical metaphor is so helpful, because you don't just sit there, you make notes on the music, that's important, but you do that in order to play the instrument. And also, you don't divvy up a symphony into tiny little pieces, and, you know, you listen to the whole song, and you listen to the parts for the sake of listening to the whole song. And I think that that musical metaphor,

[00:21:32] it helps kind of bring the dynamic nature of what the Scriptures were and are and should be in the life of the Church. And there is something about hearing the Bible read, the way it's read, and then hearing it read over time, where you do pick up on phrases. You're like, I've heard that before. You know, I remember that. I, you know, it accesses us, I think, in a different way. And so I think it's helpful. You know, when you talked about time, too, I mean, you make the point about how,

[00:22:00] I think you used the example of like a Thanksgiving dinner, how these repeated rituals connect us through time. And that's so hard for me to, I'm like, what is that? Is that just kind of psychobabble? Like, what does that even mean? That's just sentimentality. Because I have such a modern view. Because when I think about time, and I think it's a very, again, a modern industrial kind of view, it's about productivity. It's about the relationship between events. It's sort of one sequence that, you know, I even find myself thinking, how do we, you know, how does time work with the Passover?

[00:22:29] And I think about like, do the molecules in the room change? It's almost hard for me to transcend this very kind of mechanical view of things. And behind that, I think, there's also almost a spatialization of time. We think about time by almost putting it into this detemporalized spatial set of metaphors. And I think this is particularly an issue within some of our theologies,

[00:22:56] where we end up taking all these temporal concepts and transposing them into something detemporalized. We might think about this maybe of the way that someone might think that if you've got the symphony score, you don't actually need to experience the symphony. You can just have it all there in front of you. And when we think about the biblical text, we tend to think about it as something we encounter with our eyes,

[00:23:26] rather than something that we hear with our ears. And when we hear it with our ears, obviously, it's a temporal movement. It leads you through time. And there are these movements within time that cannot be experienced in quite the same way if you're just reading atemporally off a page. So, for instance, the way that the experience of listening to a poem where there are certain meanings that are suspended, perhaps,

[00:23:55] where the meaning of a particular phrase only is revealed over time. And there's a certain part of the poem where that meaning is suspended or falsely resolved, seemingly, and you think you know what you're hearing. And then there's a twist at the end. And it's discovered that earlier phrase meant something slightly different from what you first thought. That's part of the meaning, the false step,

[00:24:21] the experience of being slightly misled or deceived by what direction the poem was taking. That's part of the movement of meaning. But it's very difficult to capture that when we're thinking very much in spatial terms as readers that are reading in terms of the eye rather than the ear and reading in a way that's trying to capture temporarily arriving truth

[00:24:49] in terms of this ever-present spatialized meaning. That's a good point. Yeah, I mean, again, the music, I think about how I was watching something about the show The West Wing, if you've ever seen it, and they were talking about how the theme, it's so presidential. It feels so patriotic, but why? And the composer talked about how really all he did was reverse taps, which is what they'll play at military funerals.

[00:25:18] He just inverted some of the chords and plays it and kind of takes the melody and switches it. And it explains why you have this deep sense of like, you're primed for the show and you have this deep sense of patriotism and this deep sense of, you know, presidentialness. And I don't think that's purely experiential. It does link you to a larger cultural narrative. It links you to these memories that are not just, it's not just sentimental, but I think you're engaging with history in a unique way.

[00:25:48] And you might think about this in terms of film music as well. If you're watching something, for instance, like the Star Wars trilogy, the original, you can hear all these motifs that are playing through. There are times when you hear music and you know Darth Vader is about to come onto the screen. But then when you're listening to John Williams' music, if you know your music, you're thinking, this is Gustav Hulst, The Planets. And he's taking these themes, Mars, the bringer of war, for instance,

[00:26:18] and you hear that within the music of the Empire. And if you know the roots from which he's, he's in many ways cribbing from Hulst, but the things that he's evoking are things that are very clearly eliciting these deep themes within the text of the screenplay. And when you're watching the film, it really is powerful and very suited. But it's also bringing this cultural,

[00:26:48] it's working with this cultural deposit of space music, as it were. And so if you know these sorts of texts behind the texts, you can hear things that are a bit fuller within things that are very familiar to us. When we're reading scripture, the text narrative surface is very familiar to us. We've been listening to this since we're in primary school, since we're in kindergarten even. This is Sunday school material.

[00:27:18] And yet at the same time, the more that you know your Bible, the more that you can hear, okay, these are deep themes from before that are being drawn upon. This is not something that Luke's coming up with out of his own narrative imagination. He's drawing upon these deep roots of scriptural metaphor, or John is telling his story in a way to evoke new creation, or Matthew retelling the whole story of Israel with Christ playing the part of Israel faithfully

[00:27:47] where Israel failed. And so having ears to hear, having ears that are trained with the knowledge of the whole biblical material and able to hear within these developing motifs, earlier motifs that are being inverted, that are being varied, that are being unpacked and explored in different ways, it just intensifies our experience of scripture. I'm thinking just in my film background,

[00:28:17] just one of the things we would study was just how a lot of scenes and the way that scenes are shot evoke other movies. And there's sort of this lineage in the great masters. It's not just a cute kind of Easter egg. It's deeply thematic. There was one, I recently saw a video where they showed all the similar cinematography and shot composition of The Dark Knight and the movie Heat. Heat's one of Christopher Nolan's favorite movies. And it's amazing how he follows it.

[00:28:46] And it's not just copycatting, it's taking it and connecting it thematically in a way that once you know both of the movies really well, it just kind of deepens your experience of both of them. And you might think about, for instance, just the experience of watching the opening shot of a movie and you see the particular colors. You see maybe tumbleweed blowing across the screen and you hear the strum of the guitar. You immediately know what type of movie you're watching.

[00:29:15] Or that it's a parody of that type of movie. But it's evoking entire cultural repertoire of knowledge that someone who had never seen a Western before would not get. But when we're reading scripture, we can hear, as it were, the strum of the guitar, the tumbleweed, and we can see the colors. And we instantly know it's an Exodus story. And that is the way that biblical narrative can work in much the same way

[00:29:44] as our familiar narratives can work. Well, help us trace out some of the themes that you see. What are some themes in Exodus that can help us listen to the music of scripture, so to speak? Yeah, so the story of Exodus begins a number of years after there has been this large contingent of Joseph's family that have gone down into Egypt

[00:30:13] to escape from the famine. So you initially have this event of a crisis, the famine, that led them to go into this foreign land and take refuge there. And then they prosper and grow into a great multitude. But then they become a threat and the Egyptians turn against them. The pharaoh arises who does not remember Joseph. And in that moment, you have another crisis emerging

[00:30:43] of persecution. And that persecution takes the form of an assault upon the bride and an assault upon the seed. In this case, in the case of Exodus, it's the women who are bearing children and it's the baby boys in particular. Pharaoh wants to kill the baby boys. Now, the goal there is again an assault upon the bride. Why just kill the baby boys? Why not just kill all of them? Well, if you kill the baby boys, you can take

[00:31:12] the baby girls for your own people. And so there's an assault upon the bride and an assault upon the seed. And this goes back even further, of course, to Exodus chapter 3. It's the enmity is between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. And you can see that enmity playing out with the serpent figure of Pharaoh and his people and the seed of the woman that will crush the serpent's head in the baby boys and in the, particularly,

[00:31:42] the character of Moses. Go through the story further and God acts to judge the persecuting people. He afflicts the Egyptians with plagues and after a number of plagues, ten plagues, the people are let go and they leave with many gifts. There's a humiliation of the foreign gods. You can think about the great victory that's won over the Egyptians within the Red Sea. The humbling of the foreign gods is in the plagues where each one

[00:32:11] of the realms in which the foreign gods of Egypt claim their supremacy and their power. In each one crubin. And then they go into the wilderness and there is a new covenant formed and then they're brought into the land, they're settled within the land and there's a sanctuary established. There are many other elements that we could pick out but forms of deception for instance

[00:32:41] within the stories. But when we see that pattern it's a pattern that maybe already when we encounter it in Exodus 1 makes us think of earlier iterations. The story of Abraham in chapter 12 and following of Genesis is a good example here. There's a famine in the land. Abraham goes down with his family to Egypt and when in Egypt Pharaoh takes Sarai and as Pharaoh takes Sarai

[00:33:10] there are a number of plagues with which Pharaoh and his house are struck and then Abraham's prospering within Egypt accumulating lots of herds and he's getting lots of camels and these sorts of things maidservants and manservants and then he's sent away when it's revealed he's sent away with many gifts and he's accused of deceiving Pharaoh though Pharaoh is clearly in the wrong

[00:33:40] in that situation. He goes back to the land and as he goes throughout the land with his nephew Lot they divide out the land between them and they decide to go in different directions then in chapter 14 there's a war fought in the land against these kings that have come in and finally they end up after defeat the defeat of the kings having bread and wine as Melchizedek brings it out

[00:34:09] as the king of Salem and there is this conclusion that maybe makes you think about the movement of Israel's history from the famine going down into Egypt coming up out of Egypt then going through the land dividing out the land winning victory in the land and finally ending up at God's table in Salem Jerusalem so Abraham or Abraham plays out the story of Israel in advance this is not the only occasion you see the similar sort of

[00:34:39] exodus pattern in the story of Jacob in the house of Laban other examples could be mentioned and sometimes it's an extended portrayal of this maybe you might think about the story of Jacob and Laban as including other elements that aren't included in the story of Abraham back in chapter 12 to 14 so in the story of Jacob and Laban there is the humiliation of the foreign gods the teraphim in the story

[00:35:08] that Rachel is sitting upon and aren't discovered that's part of the humiliation of the false gods that you'll later see playing out in the story of the exodus so these themes are already familiar they're not new to us and when we get to the New Testament we can see them playing out on a far greater scale but they've been playing out again and again throughout the Old Testament a later one would be an example that could be an example is the battle

[00:35:37] of Aphek the defeat of Israel as it has brought out the Ark of the Covenant the Ark of the Covenant is taken captive by the Philistines and they bring it down round their cities and it plagues all of their cities and finally humiliates their foreign god Dagon and then it's brought back to the land with many gifts and it wanders for a while as it were it's kept outside before it's finally brought in after about 40

[00:36:07] years into the city of Jerusalem where it is established in the sort of sanctuary so this is a pattern of story that is very familiar already by Exodus and then it only develops further as we go through the text you know a couple years ago I did a series on on Revelation and I used a light hearts commentary and I remember reading and being like man this is like the Exodus of the New Testament and he

[00:36:37] talks about Revelation drawing upon Exodus language you've got plagues a lot of the similar imagery you essentially have the Exodus of the martyrs and then this kind of heavy creation language and then you have the Daniel element so it's almost as if at the very end it's going back to these themes and then kind of viewing them through this kind of apocalyptic lens and but it's amazing how many of those residences come up once you start to

[00:37:06] familiarize yourself with it now I'm curious about this so you're mentioning you know you can sort of see the compositional unity you see all these themes in Genesis going down to Egypt coming up with plunder you see you know the same thing with the humiliation of the gods even that Passover connection with Melchizedek which is very interesting how does this work with the law sections of Exodus because it's almost like you know halfway through the book you're like

[00:37:36] what is all this stuff like why you know where did this come from how do we understand the law sections in light of the narrative of Exodus well as you say it is a strange shift in the narrative partway through literally halfway through the book of Exodus just had this great theophany God has given the law to his people in chapter 20 and then you have chapter 21 to 23 is case law then chapter 24 the sealing of the covenant

[00:38:05] but then chapter 25 to 31 is just description for how to build how to build a tabernacle then 32 to 34 is material concerning the golden calf and that incident and what follows and then chapter 35 to 40 pretty much is the building of the tabernacle it just seems a bit of a weak conclusion

[00:38:35] to a story that started with such pyrotechnics the story of the Exodus you have all the plagues you have the burning bush before that you have the threat to the infant Moses his deliverance all these things in the story and it's got this propulsive narrative energy and then all these experiences in the wilderness the saving of Israel at the Red Sea the water from the rock the manor all

[00:39:05] these things and how does the building of the tabernacle fit in one of the things I think that's helpful to consider is that this is a way in which the meaning of the exodus can be brought with them and so the event of the exodus founds Israel's identity and its destiny and it's something that's constantly recapitulated and expressed within their life so the meaning of liberation from slavery is

[00:39:36] institutionalized in things such as the Sabbath the Sabbath has a number of different dimensions to it on one level it maintains a sort of economic meaning that every single Israelite has made an inheritor of this great land and the gift of freedom that God has given to his people and the gift of Sabbath is there to ensure that no Israelite is dispossessed or disenfranchised with that this memorialization of the great deeds of the

[00:40:06] Lord that later becomes refracted into these series of feasts so things like the festival calendar expressed in the celebration of the feast of unleavened bread and then the celebration of first fruits the feast of weeks or pentecost the celebration of the day of trumpets you can think about the day of atonement and the feast of the harvest with tabernacles

[00:40:35] all of these things are an unpacking of that meaning of sabbath and exodus to ensure that Israel takes that meaning with them the story of the building of the tabernacle is also one that follows the pattern of the days of creation so you have the cycle of the days of creation playing out twice in chapters 25 to 31 so the first day is the golden items in the center the ark of the covenant the mercy seat above it the table of showbread

[00:41:05] and then the lampstand and then you have the separation of the land from the sea it's the courtyard that separates the wider

[00:41:34] gentile world beyond from this realm within and then you have the land waters and the land proper with the creation of the symbol of the land which is the altar and then fourth day lights placed in the fourth day of creation what corresponds to that in the tabernacle well the oil for the

[00:42:04] lamps the light within the tabernacle then you have the fifth which corresponds with the firmament it's the birds flying across the face of the firmament it's the fish filling the waters as well that's the garments for the high priest it corresponds with day two so the clothing for the tabernacle corresponds with the clothing for the priest and then the sixth day the establishment of man is the establishment of Aaron and his sons and the seventh day

[00:42:34] is the establishment of the daily sacrifice the morning and evening sacrifice then it goes through the cycle again filling in the elements that were missing so the first day the light the gold items at the center what is the missing item well it's

[00:43:17] the human lamps oil for the anointing of the priests what corresponds with the birds that fly across the face of the firmament for the clothing of the high priest well it's the clouds the incense so it's the instruction for the incense that's next what's corresponding with the establishment of mankind in Aaron and his sons Bezalel and Aholiab the builders of the tabernacle and what corresponds with the establishment

[00:43:47] of the daily sacrifice is the Sabbath so the Sabbath is instituted at the end of chapter 31 of Exodus so you've got this essential creation pattern God is establishing a new heavens and a new earth that's symbolized by the tabernacle and the tabernacle is also a movable mountain that takes the meaning of Sinai with them so if you think about Sinai it has three different levels to it the highest level is where Moses goes ascends to be in God's

[00:44:17] presence and sees the theophanic glory of God as God reveals his glory to him then you have the side of the mountain that corresponds to the holy place with the altar of incense and the table of the lampstand that is the area where the priests and the elders have the meal for the inauguration of the covenant in chapter 24 and what's the courtyard it's the area around the base of the

[00:44:47] mountain that corresponds to the area where the people gathered and they could not touch the base so essentially what you've got is a movable Sinai where the glory of God that descended upon the mountain will later descend bring it with them wherever they can go so the point in many ways of that later section and what goes into the chapters that follow in the books that follow Leviticus and Numbers where first of all that

[00:45:17] tent of dwelling the tabernacle where God dwells in the middle of his people becomes a tent of meeting a place of communion between God and his people through the sacrificial system and that's in Leviticus in Numbers the whole camp is ordered around the tabernacle so it's an extension out of that meaning and Deuteronomy is very much about how do you take that order and place it within the land so the whole of the land is ordered around this

[00:45:47] how do you take this principle of liberation that first of all occurs as God sets his people free and then is institutionalized in the charter of Israel's existence in the life of a nation and so in the case law of Deuteronomy you have an unpacking and refracting of the Ten Commandments the Ten Words of the Covenant so essentially what you have in the material

[00:46:16] that follows Exodus 20 all the way to the end of Deuteronomy is how do you take the meaning of the event of the Exodus and make that the principle in terms of which the entire life of the people is lived out yeah that's what I've always thought too yeah that's what I've always said about those that is a very deep dive that's that's very fascinating it's a good point when you talk about institutionalizing

[00:46:46] the narrative to your point before they didn't have I mean the common people in Israel they wouldn't have had their own personal Bibles and so their access to these narratives is in this symbolic world that's made that just got me thinking about how crucial

[00:47:16] the imagination is I mean when they're hearing about Sinai they're drawing imagery from what's around them when they're hearing about the garden they're thinking about the tabernacle and they're thinking about priests and the garments and all these types of things these images that are there's a symbiotic relationship between how their imagination is formed and the visual world they occupy it's not as though they're walking around with a key saying this symbolizes that and that symbolizes this it's instinctual it's intuitive it's woven into

[00:47:58] to view these narratives and stories and have their imagination populated by that and I think we even just you know we experience that in our lives too I mean nobody you know something like somebody waves at you you don't go well that symbolizes a greeting you no they're saying hi it's just it's a direct kind of you understand it and maybe on a much larger scale you can see that with these laws and the imagery in the one thing I want to highlight is the

[00:48:28] way that this is an ordering of their time in particular so first of all there's the ordering of time in terms of the celebration week after week of the Sabbath the Sabbath is described as the great sign of the covenant God gave the people his Sabbath he gave them rest and so they celebrate the Sabbath and it constantly is grounded first of all within his

[00:48:58] deliverance of his people from Egypt they first learn about the Sabbath in the context of the gift of the manna and then it points back beyond that to the events of creation that God created the world in seven days what you've got after that is an unpacking of that even further so the meaning of the year is played out in terms of the meaning of the Exodus you start off with the feast of unleavened bread which connects with the Passover and the events of the

[00:49:27] deliverance from Egypt there then you've got at the end of the festal calendar in the seventh month the great festal month the seventh month which is not accidental you have the feast of the harvest or of tabernacles that corresponds with them leaving the houses of Egypt and it's the same meaning it's leaving the manor it's leaving the leaven of Egypt at the beginning the unleavened bread it's leaving

[00:49:57] the houses of Egypt in the event of the celebration of tabernacles and Sukkoth which is the first place they camp after they leave Ramses so you've got these two festal celebrations of seven days that correspond to the same day the day when they first left Egypt and they both relate Israel's life so the beginning of the first half of the year and the first month starts with that meaning and the beginning of the second half of the year and the seventh month begins with that

[00:50:27] meaning and Exodus then Sinai they've got their whole yearly calendar playing out in terms of this and then it plays out in a larger frame too so you've got the seventh year of the Sabbath year where

[00:50:57] debts are forgiven and you have in the seven times seven years the and so in this meaning that's played out on the one hand in a weekly cycle Sabbath after Sabbath that meaning is then played out on a yearly cycle is then played out on this larger cycle of seven years and then it's played out on the cycle

[00:51:27] that will be experienced by someone only once or twice in their lifetime as you have the celebration of Jubilee so the whole time is played out in terms of the meaning of the Exodus and then that plays out also in these larger frames where for instance in the 500th year the Jubilee times ten after their time of leaving Egypt the temple is finished and that whole order is established you can think about another similar thing in the 70

[00:51:56] years times seven of the prophecy of Daniel and then there's within that there are these cycles that you have of itinerary of approach the representation of itineraries of approach in what James Jordan has called micro crons a micro cron is a way in which a larger temporal movement can be condensed and expressed in miniature and that's expressed in the sacrificial system

[00:52:26] where the manner of approach to God is represented in a small symbol whereby through the celebration of sacrifice people symbolically approach God is a sort of enacted prayer and as they celebrate and perform this enacted prayer in a way that inhabits that act they approach God but it's a playing out of the meaning of the exodus again and you can see the exodus meaning more explicitly alluded to

[00:52:55] in certain sacrifices and so in all of these ways Israel's larger spans of time and also its movements in ritual practice are all ordered according to the root meaning of the exodus and so it gives them a way of articulating the meaning of their moment in time in terms of these larger motifs of redemptive history which is what we see in the new testament where the meaning of exodus in

[00:53:25] passover the passover lamb for instance as related to christ and the meaning of the feast of pentecost is the feast of the giving of the law now it's the giving of the spirit by which the law is written upon the heart all of these things are taking that exodus saturated time and relating it going with that you mentioned some echoes within the new testament

[00:53:56] one of the things that you stress in the book is our sense of rootedness in the contemporary church and exodus can remedy that by us inhabiting that as our story we're the exodus people that's our lineage how do we actually do that so you mentioned bringing in echoes into the new testament how does the new testament church coming to line with

[00:54:26] this narrative i mean we're not building temples we're not offering animal sacrifices so what do we do how do we imbibe especially in our happens happens happens time of the Passover his resurrection is connected

[00:54:56] with the meaning of the feast of first fruits the feast of pentecost is the feast of the giving of the law and it's where the church receives the spirit you have this meaning also of Israel's experience in the wilderness being related on to the experience of the church in first corinthians chapter 10 Paul compares the experience of Israel in the red sea with the experience of christian baptism they were all baptized into moses in the cloud and in the sea in the same way we have been baptized into

[00:55:25] christ in our baptism they all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink the rock that followed them was christ we have the same spiritual food the same spiritual drink again from christ and so the experience that they had in the manor and the experience that they had in the water from the rock corresponds with our celebration of the eccarist or the supper this is a connection that is not exclusive to paul at that point you can see the same sort of

[00:55:55] connection being drawn by christ in john chapter six in the manor discourse and then there be times when we're described as like israel in the wilderness and hebrews for instance and today while it is still today and this sense of being brought into the promised land the sense of being pilgrims and wanderers waiting to be brought into the full inheritance the homeland that we're awaiting in the

[00:56:25] future in these sorts of ways the experience of the church is directly rooted in the experience of israel and we have that within our celebrations of for instance the supper what is the institution of the lord supper it's the last supper and the last supper is the celebration of passover and so jesus does not just come up with something whole cloth he takes something that is already freighted with deep meaning and relates it to

[00:56:55] himself and then when we celebrate the supper we're taking up the meaning that christ has given that his gift of himself within the supper and we're recognizing behind that all the meaning of passover and so christ is the passover lamb given for us the blood of the covenant is related to the blood of the covenant referenced in exodus chapter 24 so we've got all this exodus meaning that's condensed

[00:57:25] and experienced in things like that we have it also in the way that within the early church and within the history of the church more generally when people celebrate baptism it will often be with reference back to something like the red sea crossing or the crossing of the jordan these events from the exodus narrative are related to the meaning of our salvation and then of course within prophecy you have the same thing you referenced revelation

[00:57:54] revelation has all these allusions to the story of the exodus you might think about these references sometimes quite explicit they sing the song of Moses in revelation chapter 15 you can think about we're described as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation that's language that is used of Israel back in exodus we can think about some of the more subtle references where you have the prince of the tribe of Judah who takes this

[00:58:24] unfaithful bride from an unfaithful city and marries her and forms this new people it's the story of Salmon in Joshua we don't read who marries Rahab until the book of Matthew in chapter 1 where we're told that Salmon the prince of Judah married Rahab it's the same story the unfaithful city the harlot city has a bride called

[00:58:54] out from it and so we have all these illusions back we have seven blasts of the trumpet that bring down the city that's the story of Jericho so if you know your Old celebrate the very rights that we celebrate

[00:59:24] the very texts that give us orientation in our lives are exodus shaped texts when Jesus talks with Elijah and Moses in Luke chapter nine in the transfiguration they talk about the exodus literally often translated as departure but the word is exodus that he was about to perform in Jerusalem and so you've got the meaning of Christ's redemption being described as

[00:59:54] an exodus and that helps us to understand where we fit into the picture and how the story of Israel should be read as a story for and about us and so when Paul takes the story of the exodus in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 he said all these things were written for our instruction for our example upon whom the ends of the ages have come so the story of the exodus is written for us it's just reminding me too in Revelation

[01:00:24] and how you talk about how you can play on the narratives where part who the people of God are after the Christ event and all these types of things something with exodus it's tied to

[01:00:54] it because it is the issue of historicity and I bring that up because Robert Alter has a great translation of the Old Testament and some other folks have done Old Testament criticism canonical criticism really trying to look at the literary artistry of the Old Testament and how it comes together not so much worried about the sources behind it and all these things but what's the final form what's common for many of them is they

[01:01:24] kind of skirt the issue of historicity or deny it outright how do we think about that as we look at this literary view reading musically it's all nice it's all wonderful but did it happen and what role does the historicity play in reading scripture the way that you're proposing yes if again we can think about some places in scripture where it's very clear that although there are all these symbolic things

[01:01:54] playing out unless there's some ground in history it's just a clever literary game so for instance Paul in first corinthians 15 if christ is not raised then your faith is in vain it doesn't matter how many literary great literary tropes are fulfilled in this event how many different ways you can connect it with other things if it didn't actually happen none of those things are

[01:02:32] worth now when we're reading the story of the exodus is not just presented to us as a clever literary myth is presented to us as events that happened in history that are memorialized and things that are constantly played out in Israel's life now here I think it's important to maybe push back a bit against some of the places from which our concerns for historicity rise from which is an

[01:03:02] understanding of historicity that is very much that of moderns we think about the important thing is just that this text is referring it's a text that's merely referring to the actual events that happened or it's seen as just dismissed as it's just a fabrication whereas when we're reading these texts on the one hand they are deeply literary

[01:03:32] art within them so they are not mere historical reportage as some have argued when we're reading the story of any of the gospels we're reading carefully crafted narratives they're designed not just to say this happened and then this happened and then this happened but designed to help us to see the meaning of what happened so that modern understanding of history that focuses upon getting behind the

[01:04:02] text to what really happened there's a problem there which is that it denies the importance of the text as a communicator of meaning that's almost irreducibly textual and so we're supposed to encounter Christ within the text and there's a way in which the text is not just designed to give us the light behind it as to enable us to see through it and for the text as it were to get out of the way is designed to be more like a stained glass

[01:04:32] window through which the glory of Christ is revealed so we encounter Christ in the glorious light that passes through that text so the text is not something we can get behind that needs to be pushed against some of the more fundamentalist approaches to historicity on the other hand to those who are just reading the text as a literary artifact as something that's a clever the sort of literary readings that someone like Robert

[01:05:02] Alter or Shimon Bar Efrat and these sorts of writers are getting at they're recognising something very real within the text and something incredibly helpful they need to be pushed back against when they're denying the historicity because the historicity matters too if these things did not happen if there's not some grounding in actual concrete history even if that history is sometimes not being referred to in a sort of literary in a

[01:05:31] literal fashion as we tend to use that term it's being referred to in a far way on occasions it matters that these things happen in part because our god is a god of history and unless we believe that he acts in and through history the meaning of the incarnation doesn't really make sense and beyond that the meaning that we expect in the eschaton as the resolution of

[01:06:01] historical meaning no longer has the should have in approaching it so it matters that these things happened in history even when they are being referred to in a far more literary and poetic fashion it matters however that the history is not just bare historicity it's literary and symbolic construction

[01:06:31] of the history so that we recognize meaning within what happened and so holding those two things together means that we'll find ourselves on the one hand pushing against the fundamentalists who can often have a very bare sense of historicity and it can mean that we push against the literary readers of scripture who can deny historicity altogether and it's keeping both of those things together the literary artistry and theological

[01:07:00] reading of scripture and the historical grounding that these things happened in time and space and that matters I just can't imagine Isaiah and Daniel in exile and them just thinking this wasn't historical because they placed all of their hope on God doing the exodus again and not metaphorically but they really wanted to get back to the land they really wanted to be liberated it boggles my mind that they could say

[01:07:30] well this is a great metaphor it was precisely the historicity of it that gave them hope for their future and in many ways that is part of the meaning I think we tend to lose about history that history as they would understand it is not just something that happened there back then it's something that animates the present the story of the exodus is God's declaration of intent for his people and it's also a symbol of what he's going to do

[01:08:00] on a higher plane and a fuller degree in the future and so the story of the exodus is constantly returned to as the north star of hope for the future and so the story is not just again it's something that has authority in the life of the people the historian as well is someone who is not just a researcher an academic who's doing some research in books and finding out what happened in the past the historian

[01:08:30] in this fuller sense is someone who's directing Israel in its hope for the future by giving it a sense of the animating and ordering story of its past and so when we're reading the New Testament so much of is interpretation of Israel's story because as you interpret Israel's past you understand what its resolution in Christ looks like and so there's a completely different philosophy of history that is

[01:09:00] required from the sort of modern philosophies of history that either arise in liberalism that tends to reject the historicity of scripture and the sort of literary mythological readings of scripture that dispense with it too and on the other hand the more fundamentalist approaches that often dispense with the deep theological and meaningful character of history absolutely and I think you're looking at both

[01:09:30] of those ditches that you fall into in a way they actually make less real what is trying to be communicated because as we gather as the church and

[01:10:00] or a sentimental thing it is actually true and I think that that's one of the hardest things in our modern world to do but I always remember too the Israelites were pre-moderns still rebelled a ton so it's like I think it's just a perennial problem God's people struggling but I think it's such a reservoir of hope and it has been throughout the history of the church the idea that the God of the Exodus is the one who is with us

[01:10:30] at all times in all places and has promised us that final rest Alistair this was a great conversation I mean we could go on and on I think there's so much more to talk about but I'm going to put a link to your book Echoes of Exodus so if learning about the Old Testament might find it a little intimidating I think it's a really accessible way to just dive in and they'll learn so much more than just

[01:11:00] about the Exodus they're going to learn about how to read scripture in general and we can put some other links to your other endeavors online but Alistair thank you so much for coming on really appreciated the conversation thank you very much for the invitation