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Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1256 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Mastering the Bible - Ancient Israelite Culture - Worldview Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge.  Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy.  Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1256 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday.  Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God and His Word.  Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday is Mastering the Bible, through a series of brief insights. These insights are extracted from a book of the same title from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars, Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better.  When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers intended. Each week we will explore two insights.
Mastering The Bible – Ancient Israelite Culture
Insight Thirteen: Ancient Israelite Culture Didn’t Drop From Heaven
People hostile to the Bible often attack it on the basis of the cultural customs found in its pages. For example, critics find easy targets in the Bible’s patriarchal culture, attitudes toward slavery, and social standards. In criticizing these customs, they make the fundamental mistake of not letting the Bible be what it is.

If we believe—and the Bible is very plain in this regard—that God chose the time, place, and people to prompt the writing of what we call the Bible, then the notion that God invented or inspired their culture is nonsense. They already had a culture—with many elements common to the wider world of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean.

What we see in Scripture is that the Bible presupposes culture. Biblical laws, for instance, presume the cultural practice of polygamy (see Deuteronomy. 21:15—17 as an example), yet the Bible doesn’t require polygamy, in fact, it portrays it as negative. There are laws regarding slavery (Exodus 21), but there is no record that God installed the institution as something desirable or sanctified.

In other words, cultural institutions that we find offensive today (and rightly so) were part of the culture of the people God prompted to write Scripture. God didn’t first create their culture, nor did he insist they change their culture before using them to produce the books of the Bible. God knew what he was getting when he called Semitic people living 3,000 years ago to write Scripture. God was not the author of their culture. Only in the cases where practices are tied to Israel’s worship, such as their religious calendar, can God be viewed as an instigator.

In some fundamental respects, culture was incidental to God's plans. God gave Israel a body of wisdom literature that laid out broad principles of justice and mercy that transcend all cultures. He kept reminding Israelites through the prophets that people from all nations would come to recognize him as the true God and therefore be members of God’s family.This latter point has another aspect to it. God knew that his people would eventually encompass people from every nation. The point is simple but profound: the people of God are independent of culture—their identity is not bound to a single cultural expression. This is by design.

We need to consider this in the western world,