The Septuagint — Timelines and Other Alterations

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's Stone Choir, we are continuing our series on the Septuagint with a discussion of some alterations to content of a couple key books in the Old Testament, as well as alterations to the timelines of really the history of humanity, and particularly the history of the Old Testament chronology, which alters things, including the beginning of time itself. So we'll talk about that a little bit. Before we get into the content, I want to just give a brief recap of where we have been, including where we've been for last month. I'm very sorry that we haven't had an episode for a while. Something blows up every time we try to record the day that

1:24 we are gonna record whatever day that happens to be. It's pretty much the worst day of my life. So I'm not gonna wind up being a podcaster because it's the easiest job in the world, but it's embarrassing that I still can't get it done. I lost my voice fifteen minutes into recording last week. My voice is still weak, which stinks 'cause I have no margin of error. Even my voice is strong, it's not strong, so I'm probably gonna sort of peter out towards the end of this, but we're gonna get this done no matter what. The Septuagint framework that we eventually evolved as we were looking at this massive content we've been looking at for now the last 18 months. We began in episode 99 with introducing the concept of the

2:04 context window, basically say there's gonna be so much here you can't keep it all in your head. That's nothing to be ashamed of or worried about, but there's a lot going on here beyond just oh a couple verses changed and so you know we can we can fix those in our Bibles and we don't have to worry about it. A septuagin thing is irrelevant. In In episode 100 and 101, we went over the Near Eastern chronology of the use and then disuse of the Septuagint. And then in 101, we talked about what happened in the early church in the West up through the Reformation. Why did we stop even talking about it? Because the whole reason that we're here talking about today is that for eleven hundred years it just kind of vanished and no one

2:48 gave it any thought at all. And we had to explain why it just went away because that was never a conscious decision. Which is a big problem. That'd be one thing, if the church had decided the Septuagint is garbage, it's not authentic, we don't want anything to do with it. That would have been wrong, but at least it would have been an act of decision. Instead, you have Jerome just sort of casually deciding unilaterally, I'm going to use what the rabbinic text says. And because Greek had been lost mostly at that point and Latin was necessary for the church in the West, everyone just went along with it because they just needed a Latin Bible. And he produced one. He was generally respected as a scholar, so we'd explained how that

3:27 happened. It was carelessness on the part of the church, and it was nasty on the part of Jerome, if not outright evil. And then we're concluding our three part middle part series of the Septuagint this week in the Old Testament section where we began with the Christological passages in the Old Testament that were changed, some added, some removed, some altered, and talked about how important it is that these things are being messed with. Whether the Septuagint is fake, whether it's wrong, or whether the rabbinic text is fake and wrong, these things are different enough that we have to really take seriously when you're messing with Christology. You're going for the family jewels. This is not peripheral stuff.

4:12 So we began there and we began explicitly with Isaiah seven fourteen. Because that verse about the virgin birth is the one that everyone wants to get tunnel vision on, and pretend that's a big change. And so if you clean that up and you can explain that, you have to worry about the rest of the Septuagint stuff. We've done the episode on a whole bunch of Christology. We did the previous episode talking about wisdom literature. And because we covered a lot of psalms in the Christology episode, we mostly focus on Proverbs and the Wisdom Literature episode the last time. And this week we're going to be concluding the Old Testament changes focusing on Esther and Job, two books which have been changed

4:53 so radically either in their content or in their or in their framing within the broader context of scripture, that they're not even the same book in the Septuagint verses the rabbinic text that we're all familiar with. So we're going to spend a good amount of time today talking about the differences there. As I said, the last portion, which is where we're going to begin this week, is on changes in the timelines, because the big change in Job in terms of context is the timeline, which is completely stripped out of it. If you've read Job, he's just floating in space in the olden times, this man who, you know, as Christians we believe wasn't mythical, but we have no idea who he was, why did he have

5:36 all this money? He must have been pretty important, but we don't know anything about him. What was deleted by the rabbis explains quite clearly who Job was. To begin talking about timelines, I want to point out something that will be the case as we're going throughout this episode. There's a difference between accuracy and precision. Accuracy means getting something right. For example, the year of Jesus' birth. Some people believe it was AD one as it was calculated, and we were using as a calendar, really for only about the last eight hundred years, incidentally The early Christian Church had no notion of this BCAD thing that was invented in the sixth century. And it was surprise, surprise.

6:22 Alkin of York and Charlemagne then normalized in the West the use of the year of Jesus' birth as year one for us counting forward. It wasn't until the 1700s when Russia began to move away from the Byzantine calendar and adopt the calendar the rest of Europe uses, that the last vestiges of Christianity using a calendar based on the creation of the world was in general use. We're not going to talk too much about different calendaring systems this week. That will be a significant portion of the bonus episode we're going to do when we're talking about how to fix the Septuagint translation problem that is ahead of the church. We're also going to talk about the calendar problem because it's not a trivial one.

7:11 But I bring it up now because it illustrates that as long as everyone's on the same page, you're going to be able to be precise. So when we talk about the current calendar, we all know what day we're talking about. When you go back in time, if you start looking at historical records, you will very quickly run into all sorts of problems where if someone hasn't Along and reconciled the counter system we use today with one they were using at the time, you can be off by months or years, centuries in some cases, like just depending on which countering system was being used by whoever is recording. Now, the important thing to understand about time, this isn't too philosophical, is that it's a dimension.

7:52 It's a part of creation, and it's always relative. So, for example, I live in the Northeast, in North America. If you live in Northeast, I am almost certainly to the northeast of you. But Northeast is only a relative comment. I'm not northeast of any of you who are listening from Europe. I'm southwest because Europe is further north even than where I am. It's kind of weird. If you ever look at the latitudes, Europe is a lot further north than North America relative to the weather that we have. It's remarkable how much the oceans change things. So in space we understand perfectly well what relativity means when it comes to a fixed reference point. It's always relative to someone else. That's why something like the North Pole is valuable.

8:35 But even then, are you talking about magnetic north pole or are you talking about geographic north pole? Because they're two different things, and one of them's moving. May flip actually. That'll be pretty exciting if that happens in our lifetimes. Time works the same way. Time is fixed. It doesn't vary. Well, that's that's a physics problem. We'll say for the sake of argument, it doesn't vary. In terms of, you know, a day is a day, year is a year, and for human purposes, that is not gonna be changing. So whether Jesus was born in one AD, as some say, maybe he was born in three BC, which others say, some you probably have strongly held opinions. I honestly don't know. I've looked at the arguments for both and they seem convincing.

9:20 I have yet to either spend or waste the time trying to reconcile them and figure out which one I prefer or make up my own or whatever. I don't really care. Because as long as we're on the same page, we can be precise about our comparisons, even if the accuracy of the claim that Jesus was born in AD one may or may not be true. What is important about the birth of Jesus in terms of timelines is that we are two thousand years and change away from Jesus birth, which means that around about twenty thirty, you know, five years from now, we're gonna be at the two thousandth anniversary of either the beginning of Jesus' earthly ministry, or if he was born prior to one AD, possibly his death, resurrection, and ascension.

10:06 Both of which I think could potentially have significance. Not because man imbues significance to round numbers, but God does. God likes round numbers a whole lot. So not one iota of my faith hinges upon something happening in twenty thirty or thirty three or thereabouts. Don't know. Don't care. But I'm paying attention. If things get a hundred times worse between now and twenty thirty, I'm really going to be paying attention. I would hope that you would too. But who knows? Like it doesn't matter about the accuracy of what God has not predicted specifically is going to happen, but we are told to watch. And time does matter. One of the things that we've said in the past, I'm really glad we did.

10:48 In the episode on evolution, we titled that six thousand years in counting. And we mentioned in that episode that there are a couple different competing timelines, which we're going to talk about here today. There's the rabbinic timeline, which we base the name of the episode on, where the creation of the earth was about six thousand years ago. If you use the Septuagint numbering instead, which the early church did, everybody did. It wasn't just a Bible thing. It was the general use of the calendar counting back to about seventy five hundred years ago. So about fifty five hundred would be the beginning of the universe. We mentioned in the six thousand years accounting episode that those two

11:29 competing timelines existed. And I'm really glad that we chose the wrong one to title it because it's an example of one of the things that we as a church are gonna have to deal with in the future. We will have made mistakes about things. When we have relied on the rabbinic text, there are going to be cases where we've made mistakes. We cannot have any ego bound up and I was wrong. Now, it's important to know that there's sometimes the mistakes are incidental, as in the case of us naming it six thousand years and counting instead of seventy five hundred. But in other cases the mistakes can be material, which was not there. So we don't need to go back and we're not even going to change the show notes for that episode because there's nothing to

12:12 retract. Because the argument that we made against evolution, we very specifically said it doesn't matter if it was six thousand years ago or seventy five hundred years ago. Either way, Adam was the first man, there was zero evolution because there was zero death. So if nothing is dying, nothing is evolving. Adam was created from dust, and every man alive since then is descended from him, period. No monkeys, no whales, no fish, no amoeba, no soup, nothing. So the entire argument that we made in the six thousand years and counting episode against evolution would have worked identically if we'd used Septuagint numbering. And had we been making an argument at that time that hinged on the 1500-year difference, we wouldn't have done the episode until we

12:57 figured out which one was right. But because it wasn't material we didn't really look into it. There would have been a different timeline for everything about Stone Choir because if we dug into the Septuagint when we did, I think we'd probably would have been doing this series a lot sooner because the changes, the errors, the mistakes are obvious and they're huge. But sometimes your arguments are going to be made in good faith, but not predicated on something that you have to give up. So evolution is still false regardless of which timeline we're using. It's okay to have made mistakes. It's important to understand the nature and the character of your mistakes. We will, as a church, be getting into the future places where

13:39 we find that certain aspects of what we believe don't actually hold up relative to the Septuagint. Are we going to be bound up in our egos to say, no, I'm a Christian, I would never make a mistake? Or are we going to accept the simple fact, the simple argument? We weren't actually looking at scripture when we made those conclusions. What is our duty to as Christians? It's to the Word of God, which then raises the question, which is the Word of God? And so it's not a circular argument, but you can beg the question if you assume that what you were previously using was the Was the pure word of God, and it turns out it wasn't, which is what we're demonstrating here. As Corey will get into later on, our Bibles are littered with

14:23 places where despite claiming to have used the rabbinic text, they ignored entirely and used the Septuagint all over the place. We confess the Septuagint left and right today as Christians. God's preserved our faith by the Septuagint even while post reformation, everyone was pretending to ignore it. The importance of acknowledging that we made mistakes is necessary because otherwise repentance isn't possible. You go back and listen to the entire episode on repentance, that's the point. You have to realize you did something wrong. Repentance is not simply a question of sin. It's a question of error. It's a question of mistake. If you've ever accidentally driven down a the wrong side of a divided street, I did this once in Madison, it was kind of

15:05 scary, it was late at night, so it didn't matter. It was a very wide intersection, I was making a left turn. It was confusing the way it was laid out. I accidentally went down the wrong way for like ten feet. I realized my error as I was turning in and I had to back up and then go through another no one else's around so no one got hurt, but I repented of my wrong left turn. That's repentance. You back up, you fix it. It's embarrassing. It's potentially dangerous, but you gotta do it. The alternative, the egoistic approach to making a wrong left turn and ending up on the wrong side of a street, you just keep going. I'm an excellent driver, I don't make mistakes when I'm driving. And you drive down the wrong side and you hit somebody head

15:46 on. We're in that position as a church where we have relied in good conscience on things that we are going to realize are not reliable. And we're going to be covering some of those today. But just keep in mind that as you realize these things, don't be embarrassed. That's not the important part. The important part is not that you were wrong about anything or whatever. The important part is not that you are embarrassed by a mistake. The important part is to be in accord with God, whatever God's word is. Even if you totally reject everything that we say about the Septuagint, and you triple down on the rabbinic text, well, like I just said, you're gonna have to burn your Bible that's based on the

16:26 Rabbinic Text because it's not really. Your Old Testament is full of Septuagint. If you actually reject the Septuagint, you have to get rid of every Bible you have and fix the ones that rely on the Rabbinic text for frequently the Hebrew is unclear. Corey and I were joking earlier, the footnote is so frequently used that the Hebrew is unclear, that we wish that we could title one of these episodes with that. That footnote, the Hebrew is unclear, is basically where the church has been. But those decisions have been left to these translators and translation committees. Usually they don't even footnote the stuff. So you as a reader just plowing through scripture have no idea. You don't know when you're reading the Old Testament over and over

17:06 again. You've been reading the Septuagint, just in bits and pieces, places where the rabbis either corrupted or just lost or confused things to the point that or in some cases, Hebrew is just so worthless as a so-called language, you can't actually use it. God has preserved the church through the Septuagint even while we've been wandering through the wilderness here with this Hebrew crap. When we come back, we're going to be a little bit embarrassed. We're gonna realize that we have to put some footnotes in some of our own comments in the past and realize the things that we said before we can't say again because they don't hold up. Repentance means accepting that and doing it humbly and willfully, and with

17:44 full knowledge that God forgives our errors, but He will not forgive those who cling to their error in the face of rebuke. The timelines that we're going to be talking about here are not new in the Septuagint either. Going back to about 220 BC, the timelines that we're going to be discussing were where the genealogies, this is principally where the alterations have occurred in the rabbinic text. In the genealogies in Genesis 5 and Genesis 11, the patriarchs have had their generations altered radically and very ham fistedly. And In a fashion that is novel to the church. Going back to about 220 BC, Demetrius the chronographer, and in 150 BC roughly, a man named Oipolemus, both of whom were cited by

18:35 Eusebius in three hundred twenty five AD, attest to the Septuagint chronologies that we're going to talk about. And in the first century of both Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish convert into Judaism, we've talked about previously, and Josephus both use the Septuagint chronologies as factual. So the first time in the church the the rabbinic timelines that we're all used to today, the ones that I mentioned in the evolution episode, the one thing that I couldn't reconcile about the rabbinic timeline of you know, the flood being about forty five hundred years ago was that there are pyramids that are forty seven hundred years old. That's a fact. It's not ambiguous. There are unambiguously pyramids that can be proven to be two hundred

19:25 years older than the date in the rabbinic text says the flood occurred. I'm pretty sure I acknowledge in that episode, I don't know what to think. It's one of those cases where I believe my lying eyes and I believe the Word of God. And I couldn't reconcile the two, and so I just basically threw it on the altar of Lord I believe help my unbelief. Which is often where some of these things come down to. We have to be humble enough to say, I'm not smart enough, I don't have the reason. I don't have the facts to be able to figure this out, and I believe scripture, and I'm going to trust God, even when I don't understand. There's no man in the universe who's so smart that he will not at some point run into that.

20:06 Because some of God's mysteries, that's the only way to deal with it. We've talked about before, when you talk about communion, when you talk about the hypostatic union of Christ, There is no rational explanation for what's going on because those are supernatural. The difference is that time is real. Time is part of creation. It's not supernaturally moving around. So So the rabbinic timeline that says the flood was 4,500 years ago does not jive with archaeological evidence. A pyramid could not exist given the description of the flood. It just wouldn't be there, wouldn't have been buried under miles of silt and mud. It certainly would have been destroyed. And so when we did that episode, like I don't know, I

20:53 believe forty five hundred years because it's what the Bible says, and I believe there's definitely a pyramid sitting here that's forty, seven hundred years old. I don't know what to make of it. But it made me uncomfortable because it didn't seem to add up. And we're dealing with a pyramid and we're dealing with years. Those are not supernatural things. So trust God, but you know, I don't know what do you do? All you can do is believe God and not worry about it too much. However, when you look at the Septuagint timeline, makes perfect sense. The flood was much before the construction of those pyramids. They could absolutely exist with the timeline. They was in use in 220 BC and in you know the

21:32 first century and the fourth century. The problem was created by the rabbis to cover up some of the other things that they were up to. So just remember that as we're going through these timelines, no Christian before Jerome ever engaged in the sort of nonsense that we've been subjected to, particularly since the Reformation. I do want to note that there's a single source in antiquity that does represent the rabbinic timelines, something that's older than the thousand year old Masoretic text that we're stuck with today. There are examples from roughly one hundred sixty, one fifty BC from the Qumran Caves of the Book of Jubilees, and there are a number of copies of that. And the Book of Jubilees, which was an apocryphal book, it's not

22:18 canonical, I think, in any one's estimation, but it was a written record, does include at least some of these changes to the genealogies. So when Jerome imported the rabbinic changes in the fourth century, it wasn't brand new at the time. It was something that had been around at least as long as about 150 BC. But crucially, that's still newer than the evidence that we have of the Septuagint timeline. So as we're going through the dates today, sometimes we're going to talk about 80 BC. I'm not going to try to stick to the point of the origin date of the earth because we don't know accurately, but we know it's in the ballpark of seventy five hundred years ago. Some of the counts say seventy five eleven, some say seventy five

23:04 thirty three. One of the links will be in the show notes, says I believe 7558. And we'll link that. And I want to include that in the show notes, and it's worth looking at. We're not vouching for his conclusions, all of them, but it's a very excellent summation of just how complicated timelines have always been. So this guy who's trying to reconcile the Septuagint, trying to make the same kind of cleanup that we are, lays out some of the fights and some of the inconsistencies that occur so you can understand how complicated it is. When we're doing some of the dates in this episode, we're just going to use relative dates. So we're going to begin later on and we're talking about Job's timeline. We're gonna talk about Abraham's birth as basically year one.

23:50 Kind of instead of A D, it's gonna be you know the birth of Abraham. If that is year one, that is a fixed point in time, it's a real point. So within the text of scripture, we can make precise measurements from the date of Abraham's birth in terms of years, and we can be consistent from that point forward. That precision is going to hold in everything that we say today, even if there's ambiguity about the accuracy of the year in which Abraham is born. So I hope you can track with this. The accuracy of a particular date in the past is not going to be relevant to any of the arguments that we're making. The relative precision within the text itself does matter, because you can move Abraham's birth around a couple hundred years, even with some of

24:34 these timeline things, as long as the text itself is internally consistent, you're not going to be falling into error with the conclusions that you make. Because it doesn't matter to me personally or to you personally whether the flood was 4,500 years ago or fifty three hundred years ago. What difference does it make? It only makes difference relative to whatever other events would have occurred before or after that. But being specific doesn't really matter. So I hope that you can come along with that and not get too hung up on, well, if I don't believe, you know, if I don't believe 7511 versus 7533 thirty three, that doesn't mean that the ballpark figure isn't true. It's okay to be off by a little bit, but you can't

25:22 be off by a lot. Just like with Jesus birth, whether it was eighty one or BC three or some other number, it's really close to that. We definitely know it's really close to that. It can only be a couple of those years because of historical records we have from Judea and Rome and from Celestial records that we have. We have a very good idea that's right close to the number we have. That's good enough. It's good enough for government work. It's good enough for being a Christian. What I don't want is for anyone's faith to be undermined by I don't know, so I'm going to give up on the whole thing. That's not a Christian conclusion. We try to get this stuff right, and if you can't figure it out, just leave it alone, just like I did with the

26:02 pyramids before, before I knew that the Septuagint timeline was accurate. Like I don't have to do with the pyramids, don't worry about it. I've never lost a lick of sleep over the fact that my lying eyes and the chronology and the rabbinic text didn't match. Like I don't know, whatever. Doesn't hurt me either way. But I'm not going to lose faith in the text. The good news is that the more we use a Septuagint for these things, the more we find those problems just vanish. There are far fewer questions of accuracy and precision of timelines with a Septuagint than there are with the rabbinic text. And there's a reason for that. So when Woe said that it is ham fisted the way they went about making these changes and the changes changes themselves in these genealogies.

26:49 It is almost an understatement. They basically just deleted a century in terms of the begetting ages of the patriarchs. But they were not entirely consistent in doing so, because it would have created problems for them down the line had they simply deleted a century from each of the patriarchs. And so for instance, if you look at this, you actually have a very clear trajectory in terms of the age of begetting children, from Adam straight through Noah, essentially, Noah being a rather extreme outlier. But for Adam you have his age of begetting is two hundred and thirty, and then Seth at two hundred and five, Enosh at one hundred ninety, Kenan at one hundred seventy, Mahalel at one hundred sixty five, Jared 162, Enoch 165, Methuselah 187, bumps up a little

27:42 bit there, Lamac one eighty eight, Noah at five hundred, those are the ages from the Septuagint. You have a little more of a roller coaster going on over in the Masoretic Land. You have 130, 105, 90, 70, 65, 162, incidentally matches the Septuagint for that one. 65, 187, one eighty seven again, matches the Septuagint. 182, they just deleted six years, and then five hundred for Noah. Now one thing they did do when they were playing this little game and perhaps it hints at the fact that they were in fact fiddling with the timeline. If you use the Masoretic, then Methuselah dies the year of the flood. Rather convenient, that's how it happens, and they actually do comment on that in the Talmud, saying that saying that God had Methuselah

28:32 die six days, or seven days, depending on how you read that, before the flood in order to provide for a period of mourning, and then the flood came. And so they wrote a commentary on their edits to scripture. Perhaps unsurprisingly. However, if you look at the actual timeline in the Septuagint, Methuselah dies six years before the flood. There's no potential conflict there. Some people will attempt to point out that there is a typographical or really a scribal error in this case in Alexandrinus in that particular codex because it has 167, but clearly that is 187, which is what we have in Vaticanus. So that is the age, the begetting age for Methuselah. But more important really than just these individual changes is the overall

29:25 change, what they did overall to this. And we'll get into this a little bit more later on as well. I will be commenting on this again in my In my closing for this episode, but you have basically a thousand-year difference here. This is a significant change. So if you're looking at the Septuagint and you calculate these years, what you wind up with is 1662 up to Noah. Whereas if you are looking instead at the Masoretic, you have 1056. That's a rather significant gap, a rather significant edit. And as Woe pointed out, this starts to make things not align with what we actually know from archaeology of human history. You don't have this problem if you're dealing with the Septuagint timeline, you have this problem if you're dealing with the Masoretic.

30:16 They created this problem. Now for them, they didn't realize it was a problem because they didn't have the archaeological records we have today, they did not understand they were creating this problem in the timeline. They thought they were just editing these dates and changing things around. Part of the reason for that, and I will get into this more in the conclusion, but part of the reason for that is because they wanted to downplay the fact that Christ appeared at a point in time that more or less aligned with what the Jews thought was going to happen. Now, Scripture doesn't actually tell us that the Christ is going to appear in the sixth age, which is what the Jews happen to think. They thought six thousand years after the creation is when the

31:01 Christ would appear. Turns out that if you actually run the numbers and look at the Septuagint, it's about fifty five hundred years. It basically matches what they believe. Again, scripture doesn't tell us this, so Christians aren't bound to believe that Christ had to appear at some particular point in time in history. But it was very inconvenient for the Jews at the time, particularly these things happening after the destruction of the temple. It's very inconvenient for them to have this long standing tradition of saying the Christ is going to appear in the sixth age and then lo and behold Jesus Christ appears in the sixth age. That looks bad for the Jews. And was undoubtedly used in order to convert some of the Jews

31:45 into Christians, because they would have looked at it. Our tradition has been saying, for however long they happen to be passing this down orally, that the Christ is going to appear And then he appeared at the time we thought he would appear. That's a pretty strong argument in their context. Again, in our context, neither here nor there, because we're not bound to believe one way or the other on that. But if you add up those numbers, it is about the year fifty five hundred. Again, as Wo said, there's some leeway as it were there, you know, plus or minus sixty years, give or take. It doesn't matter the exact date of creation. And so if you happen to be someone who's very attached to, say, Usher's chronology and you like that number four thousand four BC,

32:30 too bad, the Septuagint very clearly gives us a different date for that I kind of liked 4004 BC. But that's not the issue. The issue is not whether or not we know specifically the day, in some cases, some of these men tried to calculate the exact day of creation. Rather the point is we have these genealogies, we have a chronology that scripture gives us, and the one in the Masoretic text does not match the Septuagint, and it also does not match what we know from history to be true. Even If you have things in Scripture, supposed Scripture, that do not match facts that you know, you only have two resolutions to that possible. One the fact you thought you knew is not in fact a fact, but we do know the age of the pyramids, for

33:20 instance, there are other things as well. Or the other option, what you have is not in fact true to scripture, it is not in fact God's word. It has been edited in some way, there's a scribal error, whatever it happens to be. In our case, we don't have the problem of trying to explain away a scribal error, because there is no scribal error. There were edits made by the Jews. And this is something that early Christians recognize. This is not something that we are pulling out of thin air or we've created this or we're the first men to notice. No, this was recognized early on in the churches, in the very early Christian church, and for instance we have Eusebius saying, Therefore we suspect that this was something which the Jews did, of the changes

34:05 to the title of the timeline versus the Septuagint. This is something that has been recognized by Christians, we just simply forgot it over the ensuing centuries, and we have accepted from the hand of the Jews this timeline that does not match. And there are other wicked things that they do with this because as soon as you start tweaking the timeline, there are other things that you can do downstream. It's not just a matter of minimizing Christ, which of course they did, and there were many of the church fathers who commented on that as well, saying that the Jews fiddled with verses about the Messiah, about the Christ, and we went over that in a previous episode. But when you start fiddling with the timeline, it opens up

34:46 the possibility of doing other things downstream. And even if you step back and ignore the wickedness of doing it itself, and you ignore what they can do downstream, you should want to have the actual word of God, not something that has been edited by the rabbis. Even if there were no importance outside of simply being accurate numbers, you should want to have the accurate numbers. You should want to have what God gave to Moses to record for his church. Instead of what the rabbis have decided, they would rather have When you look at the changes to Genesis 11's chronology, it becomes even more blatant. In Genesis 11, we have about 780 years that are deleted. And they're not deleted haphazardly.

35:39 They're deleted on precise century marks. So Shem is about 100 when his son is born, and then his son when his begetting age, instead of being a hundred and thirty-five, as it is in the Septuagint, in the rabbinic text it's thirty five. So we go from a hundred to thirty-five. And then continuously from Shem through Tara, we we see I'm just gonna give you the dates from the Septuagint and you know these bunch of numbers, but they're all basically the same. 100, 135, 130, another 130, 134, 130, 132, 130, 79, 130. So in the Septuagint they all had their son at about the same time, virtually the same age every time. There's complete consistency, with the one exception of Nahor. In the rabbinic text, you have a hundred for Shem, and then

36:36 Tara has a hundred and thirty, and all of them in between have a century deleted, except for Shem's grandson Canaan, who is deleted entirely. So an entire man is deleted from scripture, and then Nahor, who was last before Tara, because he only lived to be seventy nine years. They didn't delete a hundred years, they deleted fifty. So he went from seventy nine to twenty nine. Now, some of you have probably heard of forensic accounting. There are certain tells when someone has been messing with numbers in a spreadsheet, in somebody's books for finances, that makes it very clear that human hands were involved. There's certain patterns that to us seem random and we think, well, I'm doing something very random when I change this value to that

37:28 value that are not remotely random. And when a forensic accountant applies statistical analysis, they stick out like a sore thumb. You can prove in court that someone has manipulated a spreadsheet by the numbers that certain columns end in. That will hold up in court because it's provable science that when men go into something that's natural and alter it, they produce something that's detectably unnatural. Now, you don't need a forensic accountant at all here when you see going from a hundred to a bunch of guys in their thirties to back to one thirty. And again, as Corey said the previous timeline, it drifted, it came down, but it shifted from the earliest begetting age of 130 for Adam or sorry, two hundred and thirty for Adam, one hundred and

38:15 thirty, incidentally was the same one that we see in the rabbinic text. Septuagint said Adam begat at two hundred thirty, and then they diminish slightly, but they never go below about one hundred and sixty two. Suddenly, after Shem, it falls off a cliff, and we lose an entire century for seven centuries, and we lose an entire man. This is so blatant in its manipulation that you can only possibly conclude that either the Septuagint was manipulated to come up with numbers that are entirely consistent, both with history and with the way numbers behave, or that the rabbinic text was radically altered by people who were, as I said, ham fisted. Like, this is not subtle. Chopping off a one, literally removing a digit from every number, except

39:07 for the man you delete entirely, or you know, because Nahor only begat at seventy nine, they had to switch that to twenty-nine. Because if they deleted a century from him, he would have been begetting before he was himself born. That's how blatant it is. It's not believable. And this is important because this is a timeline that goes directly to the flood chronology. The previous one doesn't matter so much, this one matters a great deal. We have lost almost eight hundred years here in Genesis eleven. It was deliberately removed, and as Corey said, like it doesn't even matter what their purpose was. And it also doesn't matter particularly which numbers you use. Like if we're just making up numbers, you know, one's as good

39:52 as another. Except we're talking about scripture. If God said it, that means it's true. And as I've said, I think in the last episode, the way Revelation ends should terrorize anyone who would take lightly altering scripture. God promises that every curse, every plague in this book will be brought upon any man who changes a single thing about it. The changes here are not subtle, they're not small, and they're not insignificant. That's a big deal. All by itself, it's a big deal. Even if it didn't, as Corey said, it still matters. We should still care about getting it right. And when you actually look, we'll provide, I said both these tables will be in the length that I provide again. We're We're not vouching for the link to the I think it's

40:39 Bible.ca has a very exhaustive examination. These numbers won't exactly align with the numbers that Corey mentioned. He said the hundred and eighty-eight for Lamek. This table says 162. Doesn't matter. And there's a footnote there on the table. So you can read. We're not vouching for those numbers and saying you have to believe this. So the reason I keep pointing this out is if you were to write down every single date and time that we're going to mention here and try to reconcile all of them, it's entirely possible they won't line up. That's okay. When we're looking at different points of reference, something's gonna move. I can tell me from experience, having spent a lot of time doing my own investigation of some other timelines, whenever you pick a

41:22 point as a reference point and start counting forward from it, you can You can have something that seems very consistent, makes perfect sense. But then you take a different point somewhere in the future in scripture and try to count backwards from there. It's frequently the case that you've made some mistake that will cause them not to line up. So there's no precision alignment in the different dates. That's certainly been going to be the case with the numbers we're using here. So don't hold us to the specifics of claims of hundred and eighty-eight versus hundred and eighty-two, It doesn't matter. One of 'em is right. But I only highlight it because if someone wants to play gotcha, I say, well, this is six years different, therefore it's all fake.

42:04 Don't be like that. That's reddit tier theology. That's what Redditors do, atheists do, when they look at scripture, they play those games of gotcha. It's really important when we're looking at this stuff to try to understand it, to try to reconcile it is men have been doing for 2000 years. Like this work is nothing new. This the website is from 2017. For 2,000 years, Christian men have been trying to figure this stuff out. It's a salutary endeavor. It's one I have no personal interest in, which is why I don't personally have strongly held beliefs one way or another about which is exactly accurate. What I do care about is that internally scripture adds up with itself. And so there are places where there's wiggle room.

42:46 As Corey and I were talking about this last week before we began recording the our aborted attempt, we don't know how long it was between the creation of Adam and the fall. Personally, I think it's less than a year. I think it's probably a lot less. Does scripture say that? No. Could it have been longer? Absolutely. So we can't make we can make assumptions, but we can't hold them as religious beliefs. We can't go wild about it. We can't be absurd because you know, if Adam's first begetting date was two hundred and thirty years, Genesis is simply silent about how long they were in the garden, how long after they were out of the garden. Was the child born? We don't know. You can piously speculate, but what you can't do is draw firm

43:29 conclusions from your speculation and then extrapolate from those. Because what you're gonna end up doing with any of these timelines is making a mess somewhere else. That's precisely what the rabbis did here when they messed with Genesis 5 and with Genesis 11. They made these changes to solve a problem that they had, and they created a much bigger mess that is very easy for us to clean up. We just have to go back to what the early church confessed. The early church used the Septuagint and frequently quoted the timeline that actually makes sense, that looks sane. When you look at the table, you'll laugh. Visually, it's absurd, especially the Genesis eleven table. It's absurd how blatant the changes are.

44:09 You can decide for yourself which one you find to be credible, but just keep in mind, someone was messing with something here, and that's a big deal. Our contention, and as we've said repeatedly, the closing argument for all of this is gonna be last couple episodes, where we just go through and quote the places where the New Testament quotes the Septuagint opposed to the Rabbinic text, where it says things that are not found in the Rabbinic text at all, but are found in the Septuagint. The New Testament validates the Septuagint as scripture. So when we are treating it as scripture here, it is not personal hubris or ego. It is with full confidence that Christ and his apostles were not wrong when they called it scripture.

44:52 One last minor point that doesn't tie directly to any of this, but it's a chronological point that's really important. And the reason I came to mind is that a couple of weeks ago, in part in preparation for this episode, I rewatched the Darren Aronofsky movie called Noah, which is an abomination. He's a horrible Jewish director who made hideous blasphemous changes. The reason I watched it is that I wanted to know what sort of pop culture influences were kind of floating around. Because that's where we get most of our theology now. You know, people think that when you die you get a harp and wings and become an angel in heaven because of Hallmark greeting cards. That's pretty much a level of theology inside the church most

45:34 of the time. So you may think it's silly that someone would derive their knowledge of scripture from a Hollywood movie called Noah. I promise you there are people who believe that stuff is real. Even if they don't do so consciously, they just internalize it. One of the crucial things that stood out in that movie, and as you frequently find it in discourse, was the claim that Shem was the oldest. We frequently see this made that Japus was younger and Shem was older. There's potentially some ambiguity in the rabbinic text in Genesis when it describes this, I think that you can make a clear argument that it's not ambiguous, but that's the problem with ambiguity. As soon as somebody's well, I don't think that's clear at all.

46:22 What are you gonna do? If you think it's clear and they think it's not clear, even if they're being stupid and recalcitrant, to some degree it may not be clear, if they're not being completely irrational. There's an important note to be made here that when we're looking at the Septuagint verses that discuss Noah and Shem and Japh. Septuagin Genesis eleven ten states clearly that Sem fathered Arphaxed two years after the flood. In Genesis five hundred thirty two notes that Noah began fathering at five hundred, and in Genesis ten twenty one it says very directly, and to Sam himself also were sons born, the father of all the sons Hebrew the brother of Japheth the elder. So the phrasing in the Greek is similar somewhat to the phrasing

47:14 in the Hebrew referring to brother Japheth the Elder. The difference is the Hebrew is a sloppy, fake, messed up language, and Greek is not. Greek is very meticulous about this stuff. So in the Greek, when it says the brother of Japheth the Elder, there can be no ambiguity that the elder is modifying Japheth, which is in perfect accord with Genesis 532 and 1110. Genesis 1110 is very clear the Shem first gave birth when he was a hundred two years after the flood. So the only way that makes sense if is if Japheth is the oldest. Which makes perfect sense when you're looking at the blessing given to Sam above Japheth. So the fact that Shem is younger, and that he was given a different kind of blessing than Japheth, and that Japheth was older

48:07 and was given a double blessing, but not all the blessings. Shem was given a very particular blessing that only applied to Japheth by him dwelling in his tents later on, referring to his progeny being the church. It makes perfect sense that Shem is younger and that Shem was the father of those who begat Jesus. That's how God does stuff. It happened with Jacob and Esau. Like it happens all the time. So it's not necessary also for Shem to be the oldest. Again, it's one of these places where it's absurd some of the changes that are made to try to seem as though the stories that the Jews tell have a greater degree of primacy than they need, because the truth is very favorable. We're gonna get at the end to some of the prayers and

48:57 some of the things that are removed from Esther They make the Jews look great, and they still deleted them. It's absurd some of the changes that were made. They're not only deleting stuff that makes them look bad, they're deleting stuff that makes them look good. But they did it for related reasons that were worse. It was enough for them to manipulate the text to delete things that actually make the lineage of Jacob look good because they wanted to do other harm. It's unbelievable. But when you look internally at the text, you don't need to refer to early church fathers or heaven forbid podcasters to reach the same conclusions. When you look at the Septuagint text and you compare it, you can only reach these conclusions.

49:38 And And I was thinking earlier today that we've highlighted a number of different things in the Septuagint. It's like, oh, this is really important, this is really interesting. I don't want anyone to get the impression that anything that we highlight in this series is the most interesting or the most important thing that you're gonna find in the Septuagint. I have no idea what that's gonna be. Every time, Corey or I look, we find more. We find a greater depth of alteration, we find a greater depth of wisdom and consistency with the rest of Scripture. It's a delight to be reading the Septuagint. I have no idea what the juiciest thing in here is. As we've said repeatedly, there are centuries of Christian theology ahead of

50:17 us. The scholarship that has yet to be done by the Christian Church, especially in English, it's never been done in English. Not once. There's not been any theology done in English about the Septuagint that was not in view of listening to the rabbis lies. This is the very most exciting time we've had in church history, to be in a place where we can actually fix these problems and be faithful in a way that our fathers failed to be, in a way that's consistent with the New Testament, consistent with Scripture itself, as I said earlier, even consistent with your rabbinic text Bible, which repeatedly throws out what the rabbis said, because it didn't make any sense. So why they do they resort to the Greek?

50:58 Let's just resort to the Greek hundred percent. It's gonna clear everything up. Before we move on to the next part of this episode, there is one minor chronological or timeline point that we need to address because undoubtedly it will come up in the future it is a relevant difference between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint. And that is the timeline of the Exodus, which is to say, does it include the time in Canaan or does it exclude the time in Canaan? And you'll see exactly why that is a question when I read a few passages from scripture here. I am going to read from Exodus twelve, Galatians three, Acts seven, and Acts thirteen. There are a handful of specific verses that are relevant, but I

51:49 am also going to read some context, because it is generally important to have context in these things. And so starting with Exodus twelve, I will read first from the Masoretic text, the ESV of course, and then I will read from the Lexum. The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years. At the end of four hundred and thirty years on that very day all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. And now from the Septuagint. Now the sojourn of the sons of Israel, during which they lived in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, was four hundred and thirty years, and it happened after the four hundred and thirty years, all the hosts of the Lord went forth from

52:33 the land of Egypt by night. You can see the salient difference between these two, of course, and that is, the phrase that is included in the Septuagint and in the land of Canaan that is absent from the rabbinic text. And so the question is, was there a short sojourn in Egypt or was there a long sojourn in Egypt? Was it four hundred and thirty years, in Egypt alone, or was it four hundred and thirty years, part of that being in Canaan? Traditionally, a number of Christian exegetes, particularly in the early church when they were indeed using the Septuagint as their Bible, basically divided it into a period of two hundred and fifteen years in Canaan and two hundred and fifteen years in Egypt, giving the short sojourn in

53:23 Egypt. It is worth noting here in passing there are some manuscripts of the Septuagint that have what appears to be a scribal error adding a five at the end of four hundred and thirty, yielding four hundred and thirty five, however the majority position as it were of all the manuscripts is four hundred and thirty, so that does happen to agree with the total given in the rabbinic text, the difference is where those years of sojourning took place, is Canaan included. And so I will also read from Galatians three and Acts seven now to give a human example, brothers, even with a man made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring.

54:11 It does not say and to offsprings, referring to many, but referring to one, and to your offspring, who is Christ. This is what I mean. The law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void, for if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise, but God gave it to Abraham by a promise And the high priest said, Are these things so? And Stephen said, Brothers and fathers, hear me, the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was in Mesopotamia, before he lived in Haran, and said to him, Go out from your land and from your kindred, and go into the land that I will show you. Then he went out from the land of the Chaldeans and lived

55:00 in Haran, and after his father died, God removed him from there into this land in which you are now living, yet he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot's length, but promised to give it to him as a possession and to his offspring after him, though he had no child, and God spoke to this effect, that his offspring would be sojourners in a land belonging to others, who would enslave them and afflict them four hundred years. But I will judge the nation that they serve, said God, and after that they will come out and worship me in this place This place. Some will read these two passages and try to raise an additional question about the period in Canaan and Egypt, about the sojourning period.

55:44 And they will try to say, well one says four hundred years, Stephen, and one says four hundred and thirty years, Paul. And so the question is, is it four hundred and thirty years as aligns, incidentally, with Exodus, or is it four hundred years? I personally do not take this particular contention very seriously. I simply agree with Augustine and other church fathers who said Who said, Stephen is rounding? We do this all the time. We don't often speak of the exact number of years of an event unless it's a relatively trivial number of years. Which basically means under twenty or so. If an event took three hundred and eighty seven years, we're probably just going to say it took four centuries.

56:28 If it took four hundred and thirteen years, we're probably going to say it took four hundred years. This is simply how human beings speak. Stephen is giving a speech here, so he simply rounded. I think this is a fairly easy one to resolve. The final section I am going to read is from Acts thirteen. So Paul stood up, and motioning with his hand said, Men of Israel and you who fear God listen. The God of this people Israel chose our fathers and made the people great during their stay in the land of Egypt. And with uplifted arm he led them out of it. And for about forty years he put up with them in the wilderness, and after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance.

57:11 All this took about four hundred and fifty years, and after that he gave them judges until Samuel the prophet. Now there are those of course who will look at this and say well now we have a third number four hundred and fifty years. But they'll ignore what came directly before that, and after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance. Paul is talking about a period here that includes other things than just the sojourn. It includes the destruction of those seven nations, as it literally says there in the preceding verse. And so the four hundred and fifty year period does align with the four hundred and thirty year period. Paul is simply including something additional.

57:54 And so what are we to make of this? I think the best way to look at this is we look at what Paul says in Galatians, and in Galatians he gives the number four hundred and thirty, he's giving a literal number. Because incidentally, when we look at how human beings speak about numbers like this, typically we round, but if we give a number that is not rounded, four hundred and thirty is not rounded, then we're probably speaking precisely. Paul here is speaking precisely, and the number that he gives aligns perfectly with the number given in Exodus. And so the only question that remains is whether or not the sojourn in Canaan is included, which is to say, is the sojourn in Egypt short or long? I am inclined to agree with the early church, and I think

58:42 that is the correct The correct position on this, the early church, looking at the Septuagint, believed that the sojourn in Egypt was short, about two hundred and fifteen years, and then to get to that four hundred and thirty year number, you have two hundred and fifteen years of Abram's or Abraham's sojourn in the land of Canaan. This is what many of the church fathers believed, this is what they argued over against the Jews who sometimes would argue for the longer period from whatever text they happen to be using at the time. The short Egyptian sojourn happens to harmonize with the genealogies and again with the words of Paul, and so I think that is the clear choice here. It is worth noting before we move on to the rest of

59:27 the episode, simply because there are always going to be those who attempt to find supposed discrepancies, seeming inconsistencies in scripture, and try to discredit the word of God on the basis of those seeming inconsistencies. Typically what it comes down to is the inability of those who are advancing these supposed or seeming the seeming inconsistencies to actually read the text. In the case of Paul's speech in Acts, we'll have those who try to argue that he says four hundred and fifty so it must be inconsistent, but literally the previous verse explains the additional twenty years This is simply a matter of reading the text carefully and believing what it says. There are things where we're going to have to map out exactly

1:00:13 what happened on the timeline, what happened when, which periods took place, where, things like that. But that doesn't mean the text is inconsistent or that the text is wrong. What it means is that we have to read carefully, and some of our preconceived notions or our previous beliefs, on the basis of the Masoretic, on the basis of the rabbinic text, they are simply going to be wrong in light of what we clearly see in the Septuagint. And what the Septuagint says here is that they lived in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan during this sojourn, and so simply speaking, that is what we as Christians believe. The bulk of this episode is undoubtedly going to be going over the differences in Esther, but before we get to Esther, we want

1:01:05 to spend some time in Job. Both of us like the book of Job. We know that many of you also like the book. There are significant difference, pervasive differences, between what the rabbis gave us, and the Book of Job. We are not going to go over them exhaustively in this episode, because that would take significantly longer than an entire episode. It would have to be a series unto itself, and probably a long one But sort of by way of introduction, I'm going to read a quote for you from origin written to Africanus. Again, through the whole of Job, there are many passages in the Hebrew which are wanting in our copies, generally four or five verses, but sometimes, however, even fourteen and nineteen and sixteen.

1:01:53 But why should I enumerate all the instances I collected with so much labor? To prove that the difference between our copies and those of the Jews did not escape me. In Jeremiah I noticed many instances, and indeed in that book I found much transposition and variation in the readings of the prophecies. Again in Genesis, the words God saw that it was good, when the firmament was made, are not found in the Hebrew, and there is no small dispute among them about this. And other instances are to be found in Genesis which I marked for the sake of distinction, with the sign the Greeks call an obelisk, as on the other hand I marked with an asterisk, those passages in our copies which are not found in the Hebrew.

1:02:35 What needs there to speak of Exodus, where there is such diversity in what is said about the tabernacle and its court, and the ark, and the garments of the high priest and the priests, that sometimes the meaning even does not seem to be akin. And forsooth, when we notice such things, we are immediately to reject as spurious the copies in use in our churches, and enjoin the brotherhood to put away the sacred books current among them, and to coax the Jews, and persuade them to give us copies, which shall be untampered with and free from forgery? Are we to suppose that that providence, which in the sacred scriptures has ministered to the edification of all the churches of Christ, had no thought for those bought with a price, for whom Christ died,

1:03:17 whom although his Son, God who is love spared not, but gave him up for us all, that with him he might freely give us all things. In all these cases consider whether it would not be Would not be well to remember the words you shall not remove the ancient landmarks which your fathers have set. And you can go ahead and find that in your English copies of scripture that are based on the Masoretic text. You can compare the things said in that quote in particular about the firmament and God saw that it was good, and you will notice that they are absent, and if they're not absent they are footnoted because they are included from indeed the Septuagint. But to give some examples of the differences in Job, and again

1:04:01 we won't be going through exhaustive examples because there are so many of them, but starting with Job one, verse five, first from the Masoretic, then I'll read from the Septuagint. And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and consecrate them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings, according to the number of them all. For Job said, It may be that my children have sinned, and curse God in their hearts. Thus Job did continually. And now from the Septuagint. And when the days of the banquet were finished, Job sent and purified them, rising up each morning and offering for them a sacrifice according to their number, one calf for a sin offering for their

1:04:41 lives. For Job said, In case my sons have thought evil things in their minds toward God. So Job acted all the days. It is a little different to think something evil or inappropriate toward God in one's mind and to curse God in your heart. That is a significant change that the rabbis introduced into Job. And from the very next verse. Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. Now from the Septuagint, and it happened that one day and behold the angels of God came to stand before the Lord, and the devil came among them. Now we could quibble over the difference between the devil and Satan. That's neither here nor there, and in fact it is the same

1:05:28 individual, of course, the same actor is present. But there is a difference here between the sons of God and the angels of God. We could argue about what that difference means and how it aligns with other verses in scripture and whether the same language is used, but the change is significant. They change the angels of God to the sons of God. They are They are trying to teach something different. As we said earlier about the genealogies, just because something may seem innocuous on the surface doesn't necessarily mean that it is. There is undoubtedly ulterior motives in play here. They have something in mind they are trying to accomplish down the line. And notably with the genealogies again, that is going to come

1:06:14 back in my conclusion for this episode, because it actually plays a key part in things that are happening today. These are not issues that we left in the past. These are things that are ongoing. The next example from Job two. And you will note that sort of not bearing the lead, but you will note the version in scripture in the Septuagint is actually significantly longer. This is one of those cases where they simply deleted a bunch of verses because they felt like it. So first from the Masoretic text. Then his wife said to him, Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die. But he said to her, You speak as one of the foolish women would speak, shall we receive good from God, and shall we

1:06:59 not receive evil? In all this Job did not sin with his lips. And now from the Septuagint. And after much time had passed, his wife said to him, How long will you wait, saying, Behold, I wait, for just a little time to receive the hope of my deliverance? For behold, your memory has been removed from the earth, sons and daughters of my belly, pangs and labours that I laboured with hardship pointlessly, and you, you seat yourself among the decay of worms, to pass the night in the open air, and I am being led astray and am a servant wandering from place to place, and from house to house, welcoming the sun when it sets in order that I might stop my labours and pains, that now come to me. Now say some word to the Lord and die.

1:07:45 But looking up he said to her, You speak like one of the foolish women, if we accept good things from the hand of the Lord, shall we not endure evil things? In all these things that happened to him, in no way did Job sin by his speaking before God There is a fairly significant difference between saying say some word to the Lord and die, and curse God and die. Job's wife here is just lamenting what has happened to Job and what has happened to her. She is not telling Job to curse God, and yet the rabbis have changed it, so that she instructs her husband to curse God and die. One of the other things to note in the text of Job, which is universal in the Septuagint, is that you'll find that Job is one of the Bible books that uses the words Lord and

1:08:40 God more than probably almost any other. They're talking about or to God the entire time, where God is speaking, God is acting. So Lord and God appear a whole bunch, which means in the rabbinic text, you're going to have the tetragrammaton. You're going to have YHWH showing up over and over and over again. We talked, I think, in the Judaizing heresy episode about the blasphemy of so-called Yahweh. There is no Christian nexus to the use of the word Yahweh or even to the use of the Tatragrammasan itself. This is fundamentally Babylonian black magic name magic. This is a black magic practice that the Hebrews brought with them from Babylonia. Practicing name magic is wicked and damnable. What they have done is taken Lord and God that are used

1:09:36 throughout Scripture. The same words are used in the Old Testament and New Testament Curios and Theos Lord and God, like Curi and theology. These words are familiar to us from the liturgy and from just being Christians. They're based in the Greek. The Septuagint doesn't have any tetragrammatum, doesn't have any special magic words or letters or anything. There's no special symbol. It's literally God and Lord. That's crucial. That's crucial today in a way that was never crucial before, because the Judaizing that has taken over the entire church is novel. The fact that we have theology published and pastors referencing Yahweh is though they're doing something sacred. It's profane and it's blasphemous.

1:10:27 You will not find it in the Septuagint, you will not find it in the early church fathers. No one who used the Greek, it never would occur to him. And to the extent that they commented on it, they disregarded it. Theos God curios Lord It boggles the mind how much of the modern heresies, both politically and theologically that we are beset by, are originated with these sorts of small textual changes. It's the smallest reframe in the world. Because what does it do? Suddenly it makes the rabbinic text paramount. You can't have the authentic God if you don't have the rabbinic text. If you're not looking at Hebrew letters, you're not looking at anything that God breathed out. And what do we find when we look at God's name?

1:11:16 We don't find Lord, we don't find God. We find special magical symbols with a special magical secret word that was so sacred that they wouldn't even write down the full thing because it was too powerful. That's a magic incantation. That's demon summoning. That has nothing to do with the Lord God. There are archaeological examples going back nearly a thousand years before the birth of Christ, to a to a Yah and a Yahweh appearing in the Near East, and they're always demon gods. There was a demon god by that name that was worshipped, and we do have archaeological evidence of it, and what we find is as nothing whatsoever to do with the true Israelite religion. Those who actually practiced and preserved Christianity as God had instructed and

1:12:07 intended for them didn't engage in that. You find it with their neighbors, and so there were others among the Hebrews who pulled that stuff in and adopted it. And the rabbis continued it for three thousand years. But when we see it and hear it today, we are not hearing anything Christian. It dies with the Septuagint. There are just a few other notes I want to make about changes to Job before we get into the chronological changes, because the timeline alterations through changes in facts in Job are really the most important thing about what was done to it. All in all the rabbinic text is about one sixth longer than what is in the Septuagint. It's mostly poetic repetitions. It includes a big chunk of Elihu's speech from chapters thirty two

1:12:55 through thirty seven. Job's wife's speech is omitted entirely. The next thing that happens after her diatribe is that Job's friends show up. Now, Cory and I pointed out in the past, even before we understood the Septuagint, Corey had made the point that when you look at Job and you look at the wealth that he lost and then what was regained, he had to be one of the richest men on the planet. It was not just oh this guy's has a lot of money, this guy's a lot of wealth. His riches were off the charts. The only reasonable conclusion in this era was that the man with that much money has to be a king. Because in all of human history, the richest guy in the country is the king. Whoever has the most money is in charge.

1:13:43 And you know what? That's still true today. We paper it over with this fake democracy crap. The richest guy is the most powerful guy. Now, it only falls apart to the extent that a lot of modern wealth is digital, it's notional in nature, such that these guys had wealth, they had camels, they had armies, they had land, they had stuff, they had real goods. That is somewhat different than having extra zeros in your bank account. If you get to eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve zeros zeros, you're at a level that virtually none of us, probably nobody listening, can understand. Nevertheless, until you deploy that capital, it really just impresses people. And people are very impressed by it. It opens doors.

1:14:30 You have friends that others would not. But the power incumbent doesn't necessarily scale as it did at the time. So for Job to have all this stuff, not merely gold, not merely a spreadsheet with wealth. He actually had the stuff, made him one of the richest men. And what is clear in Job both the first and the last chapters is that he was a king. His friends, his three friends are described, when they showed up. I'll just I'll read what Brenton says here. Now his three friends, having heard all the evil that was come upon him, came to him each from his own country. the king of the Famens, Baldad, sovereign of the Saukians, so far king of the Menaeans, and they came to him with one accord to comfort and to visit him.

1:15:17 So Job makes very clear the text of Job makes clear that his three friends are also kings. Which makes sense, because rich people have rich, powerful friends, that's just how it works. You very rarely at any place in time in history see substantial crossing of boundaries of class lines. That's normal, that's fine. Who better to commiserate with a king who's lost everything than another king? I could try to commiserate with Job and uh try to give him a good advice, but I wouldn't actually know what it's like to lose a king's ransom, to lose a king's kingdom, to lose all of his goods, you know, children are children, and they're the most precious thing. But to lose a bunch of stuff, you have to have it

1:15:58 to know how much it would hurt to lose it. A poor person can't possibly identify in the same way. So it makes a lot more sense when you know that Job is a king to know that his three friends are kings too. And that by itself is contextual, but it doesn't still really play into the timeline of things. Before I give you Job's actual genealogy at the end of Job in chapter 42, this is a portion that's completely delivered from the rabbinic text. And we'll talk about why. The very last line of the same Job that we've all read together in the Rabbinic text said, And Job died an old man and full of days. Like, okay, great, yeah. Happy ending. But it's not a Christian ending. It's a good ending, but it's not the Christian ending.

1:16:46 Here's the Christian ending. Here's what the Septuagint says. And Job died, an old man and full of days, and it is written that he will rise again with those whom the Lord raises up. Boy howdy, that is a radical difference, isn't it? It harkens back to the comments of Joe Bain earlier, where he said that he knew that he would rise bodily, and he would see the Lord with his own eyes, even though he died. So there the confession that Job makes of the resurrection of the dead is left intact in the Rabbinic text, but at the end, chapter forty two, where he describes his death, it recapitulates that. It is written that he will rise again with those whom the Lord raises up. That's the gospel. Job ends with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

1:17:33 And then the portion which is deleted entirely from the rabbinic text, I'm going to read all of it. It's only about a paragraph, but it repeats that his friends who came to him were Dalphaz of the children of Esau, King of the Thamanites, Baldad, sovereign of the Saukians, so far king of the Menaeans. And it also says Job's own genealogy, which is crucial. Because the problem that we have with Job, the book, and the Rabbinic text, is it's just some guy floating in space, we don't know. We don't know when. He's in the Near East, we can tell that. He's somewhere around that time, but we don't know any specifics. The specifics provided in Job forty two in the Septuagint well actually we'll read the rest of it.

1:18:21 This man is described in the Syriac book as living in the land of Aesus, on the borders of Eudimea and Arabia, and his name before was Jobab, and having taken an Arabian wife, he begot a son whose name was Enon, and he himself was a son of his father Zar, one of the sons of Esau, and of his mother Borsora. So that he was the fifth from Abram. And then it goes on to list the kings who reigned in Edom and it includes Job. Job Ab was a king of Edom. So it makes clear the reason that his friends were kings was that he was a king. Once you know that Job has a genealogy, and in fact, is a descendant of Esau, descendant of Abram. Now we can plug it into the timeline, which is why we're gonna finish up the timeline stuff talking about Job himself.

1:19:13 This is a really big deal. I this honestly blew me away. The chronology that's provided in Job forty two is mirrored in Genesis thirty-six, which we all have. Genesis thirty six says Jobab son of Zara, Zare, son of Ragul, and Esau. And in speaking of the kings it says and Balak died and Jobab son of Zara from Borsoba reigned in his stead. So Genesis 36 confirms that there was a king Jobab, a king of Edom, tells when he reigned, tells who his parents were, and it matches up with Job 42. Now, it doesn't match up identically. This is one of those cases where when you're looking at genealogy, there are always issues. There are always seeming inconsistencies in all of these genealogies. I want to highlight the specific inconsistency in the Septuagint, because it's

1:20:07 important to acknowledge it, and it's important as the admonishment that I gave earlier about not being a rat-it-tier atheist, do not come up with some rule that you're going to disqualify the Septuagint because of this sort of inconsistency, do not come up with a rule that would also nullify the genealogies in Matthew and Luke of Jesus Christ, because they also require reconciliation. They don't line up perfectly, and we've explained why that is as a church. Not stonequare, we don't need to do this work, there's nothing novel there. The church has always contended with the fact that God tells the same story repeatedly in slightly different ways. God loves to do that for some reason. Don't know why.

1:20:48 Yeah, we kind of do too, but when he does it in scripture and gives us parallax, we don't get to just throw out the one that we don't like, even if we can't exactly reconcile them. And this is very much a case where unlike the pyramids in the timeline of the flood, we have to simply say, Lord, I believe help my unbelief. If we can't reconcile them, we say it's all true and I don't know why. That I think that's the most Christian response we can have. There are times where that is going to apply. And it applies to things in the New Testament. The Septuagint does not create any problem here that the church has not contended with for a long time. So when Job 42 says that Job himself was the fifth from

1:21:31 Abram, that is not consistent with Genesis 36, which in effect says that he was the great grandson of Esau rather than his grandson. So what we have here is what is commonly referred to as a telescoping generation, where one man in the case of Jobab's chronology in Genesis thirty six, Ragul is omitted in Job forty-two. There are cases where God omits men from genealogies. It's something we've always had to deal with. We just have to take it. Now, having looked at this for quite some time, trying to reconcile it myself, my personal conclusion, and I think the safe Christian conclusion, is that we should view the inconsistency in Job forty two where it says fifth from Abram, where Ragul is omitted, as for some

1:22:21 reason Ragul was simply omitted by God. We don't know why. We know that he was not king. His sons were made powerful, but he himself was not. That's something that's told in Genesis thirty-six. But we don't know what happened to him, but we do know that he was a real man. So I think that it's the far greater error to go into Genesis thirty-six and delete Ragul than to infer his existence in forty two, in Job forty two. Another thing that's a small detail here, but if you want to look at these texts yourself and you want to be really meticulous you will find that in Genesis it will say Zara and then it will say Zar, Z-A-R-A versus Z-A-R-E. And the name for the wife for the land in Genesis 36

1:23:08 is Borsoba, whereas in Genesis 42 it's Borsoba, so a H A versus a B A. By itself, if just one of the names were different, you could say, well maybe that's slightly it's an inconsistency, I'm not sure if the same person. When both the father and the mother are off by only one character, it's absolutely the same person. And this is not just a Bible problem. About ten years ago, I took a road trip around the country and I had the privilege to visit family graveyard on my mom's side in western North Carolina in Ash County. Mentifour is one of the places flooded out it out. The family plot is up on Top of the Hillside, and I found it online on Find Grave and made sure that was one of the waypoints that I visited because my grandfather who's buried there

1:23:57 actually helped build the Blue Ridge Parkway. Yeah, my grandfather helped build it. If you look that up, he was born in eighteen ninety seven. My grandpa was eighty two when I was born. He was really old. It's like there's you know, talking about generational compression and sliding. That still happens today too. My grandma's about twenty years younger than him, and my mom was the third youngest of nine brothers and sisters, so you know, things can start to stretch even in modern days. The reason I mention the family plot is that in that graveyard with graves going back about 150 years, the surname of my mom is spelled three different ways. So within living memory, the same people were spelling the same surname

1:24:41 in different ways. So if you've never done genealogy before, you probably haven't run into that. But when you look at the Old Testament, when you look at scripture and you find these minor inconsistencies in spelling, it's important to verify is it the same person or is it somebody with a similar name or you know a different person with you know an approximate name, or is it the same person with the same name just being recorded in a different way? Because if it could happen to people who were my ancestors 75 years ago, it can absolutely happen 4,000 years ago. It's nothing new. Prior to basically universal literacy, and even with universal literacy, people have not always been completely consistent about even spelling their own names.

1:25:22 And you know, sometimes they'll diverge and then sort of get locked in. So in that family plot, a couple generations back, people were spelling them inconsistently. At some point, one of those inconsistencies got locked in in a couple different ways. Genealogy looks kind of weird sometimes. If you are gonna be autistic and you're gonna be meticulous about precision, it's really frustrating. Because you can't necessarily get exact perfect matchups of everything. But way you can rest assured is that regardless of whether or not you know your great grandparent's name, you know that you had to have a great grandparent. Even if you know you were adopted or was lost for whatever reason, that person had to exist or you wouldn't be here.

1:26:03 That is an absolute biological mathematical certainty. So it's absolutely a certainty that Job had parents and grandparents and so forth. And when we look at Job forty two and reconcile with Genesis thirty six, the only thing we have to contend with is this telescoping generation where Ragul is eliminated, and Job is in effect called a grandson of Esau rather than a great grandson, which even today is not strange. You know, if you're a northwestern European man, you would call Charlemagne your grandfather, or you could, because virtue all of us are going to be have been descended from him. It's not abnormal to skip the forty generations between here and there to say Charlemagne's my grandfather.

1:26:47 Scripture itself does this as well. God said to Jacob, I am the Lord the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac, even though that was skipping a generation. Jacob also asked, Do you know Laban the son of Nahor? However, Genesis makes clear that Laban is the son of Bethel, the grandson of Nahor. So regardless whether you're using a Septuagint or the rabbinic text, there are cases where men are called sons or actually grandsons and so forth. That sort of lineal descent, we're all sons of Adam. It's normal to talk that way. When you're getting into the specificity of exactly which generation it is, there's sometimes ambiguities. That's particularly the case in these cultures in this day.

1:27:28 So I pointed out because if you dig into it, all this is this doesn't match. This can't be the same. Therefore, what are you going to do? Are you going to throw it all out? If that's your conclusion, just know you're going to be throwing out Matthew and Luke and a whole bunch of other stuff. Because these problems are nothing new. And they're nothing that should concern anyone with strong and mature faith. And if you're new to the faith, don't worry about it at all. Don't get tied up in genealogies and worny worrying about this stuff. It's not the crucial part of the faith. But what is crucial is not lying about God. If it turns out that there's been a mistake, an error, an omission, we try to do better.

1:28:04 And in the case of the Septuagint, what we find is that the removal of this detail that Job was actually the king of Edom, and that he was descended from Esau by a couple generations, is profoundly important because what has just happened by that one fact in Job 42 is that Job the man is ripped out of mythology and placed directly in a timeline that's in the Bible. This appears in two parallel paces in the first five books of the Bible. In Numbers 20 and in Deuteronomy 2, where the same story is basically retold. Like I said, God likes to repeat Himself and tell the story in slightly different ways. And it's really important to look at both of them together because when you plug in the fact that Job was somewhere in the

1:28:55 neighborhood, somewhere around this time, and he was the king of Edom, it radically reframes the end of the Exodus. I'm just gonna briefly summarize the key events in Numbers twenty here. The Israelites revile Moses and God. God tells Moses and Aaron to speak to the rock and to provide water. Moses strikes the rock instead of speaking to it. God immediately pronounces death upon both Aaron and Moses for their disobedience. So that's one paragraph in numbers twenty. The next paragraph is numbers twenty is this. The king of Edom, who is unnamed, says he'll kill the Israelites if they set one foot in his land. He says he's going to send his army out, you're not crossing our border at all. And there's no moral commentary whatsoever in the text against the king

1:29:45 of Edom for doing so. And then the next paragraph, concluding numbers twenty, God told Aaron to give his son his priestly garments and go up on a mountain, and God killed him on the spot. Aaron didn't die of natural causes. Aaron didn't die of old age. Aaron died because God said now it's your time to die. And while that is true for all of us, it is seldom true in such an immediate fashion. And it's I think it's notable just looking at Numbers twenty as a story in general that you know Yeah. Aaron wasn't the one who struck the rock. Moses struck the rock. But they were brothers, they were there together as leaders. Aaron did nothing. I'm sure it makes perfect sense when you read the story how

1:30:29 much the Israelites had been haranguing Moses, it makes perfect sense that he got angry. And God said there's gonna be water coming out of this rock. He probably took his staff and struck it with both hands as hard as he could. He was pissed. He was angry, and that was sin. Undoubtedly Aaron shared his frustration which boiled over into anger at the Israelites and their grumbling, the fact they were reviling him, and reviling God by extension, because God had placed them there as their leaders. That one act of disobedience, in a case of Aaron, God struck him dead almost immediately. He's dead by the end of the chapter. So this came up earlier today, it's unrelated, but there's a blow up on X recently, once again, about the sinful past of girls

1:31:17 and what obligations men have to take a girl as a wife who may have been acting up in horrible ways. Some I think it's protestia published an article saying that if an OnlyFans model, in quotes, if an OnlyFans prostitute becomes a Christian and stops doing that, you have a Christian obligation to marry her. And all those claims are always predicated on the notion that once someone is forgiven by God, all the consequences are wiped away in this life. You can never have any consequences applied to you once Jesus forgives you. If that were true, either Aaron is burning in hell, or has God sinned, because Aaron was a godly man. It was this one sin that condemned him to physical death. It did not condemn him to eternal death.

1:32:09 He was properly mourned immediately by the Israelites For the appropriate period of time, because he was a great patriarch. All of his sons became the priesthood. He was a great man. He died in the Lord, and yet it was immediately the Lord who struck him dead for his sin. The consequences of Moses and Aaron sinning, and you know, again, Aaron's sin was lesser, certainly lesser than Moses's, and yet Aaron died first. God killed him almost immediately. Said, Go up on the hill, take off your clothes, give them to your son, and you die. And that's exactly what happened. That was temporal consequences for sin. This is our God. And one of the overarching problems that we have, one of the reasons the stone choir exists, one of the reasons we're doing the

1:32:55 Septuagint series at all, is that because post-Reformation certainly this reframing of the Jews as being central to everything, as being the key that unlocks all of human history, certainly. Adam was a Jew, right? Had to be. Noah was a Jew, right? Because that was just, you know, they have the lineage and they can they can name them, so obviously they're all Jews. We've demonstrated the absurdity of that in the Hebrews Israelite and Jews episode. But these notions have become pervasive, particularly in American Protestantism today, and they have suffused every aspect of how we view everything, such that when you see things like God striking Aaron dead for his sin, for Moses' sin and his participation in it, as a lesser

1:33:42 participant, we don't see anything at all. Because what's numbers 20 to us? If we have a Jew focused view of the Old Testament, well, you know, it's just it's a story about what the Hebrews are doing out in the desert and it's got nothing to do with us. There's no moral conclusion to be drawn is there? Whereas if you look at Aaron being a Christian, being a believer who died in the Lord, and God killing him for his sin, it can be unambiguous that there are temporal consequences for sin even when that sin is forgiven in eternity. It's not the subject of today's episode, but it's an ongoing battle in the church in what is lost by despising what's actually in the old testament, is the fact that God is not the God

1:34:28 that we're often told he is. God killed Aaron on the spot for what he did. So that's an aside, but it's a crucial one because this is a live issue. The whole reason we're spending all this time talking about some translation is not because it's a fiddly detail of history. This is not textual criticism. This is about whether or not we believe God in everything that He says and take it seriously and act like it. And right now we're not doing a very good job of that at all. In the middle paragraph where it says that the king of Edom refused entry, when you read Edom, you think, oh man, those Edomites, they were terrible. Later on, they absolutely were. They were malicious, they were despicable, they were truly wicked people.

1:35:09 They were not those wicked Edomites in this day. They were, in fact, God fearers. Now, here's where the timeline comes in. And these are some numbers that I produced myself. I'm not going to publish them certainly at this time, because I'm not the guy I'm not I'm not fiddly or patient enough to try to line up every single thing to make sure that it precisely works. But I'm gonna give you a timeline here that's going to be anchored with Abraham's birth basically at year one, just like we have AD year of our Lord one with Jesus' birth ostensibly, AD, you know, birth of Abraham year one here for this timeline. These numbers are absolutely internally consistent. Abraham is born 75 years later, he's given the promise, and he

1:35:59 enters into Canaan. At 100, Isaac is born. At 160 years at years after Abraham's birth, Esau and Jacob are born. And we often say Jacob and Esau, but Esau was the firstborn. So again, don't freak out when the second born has a greater blessing. That's something God likes to do. But it's always in punishment. It's always because something has happened. And then fifteen years after the birth of Esau and Jacob, Abraham dies at age one hundred and seventy five. Seventy six years after Abraham dies, Joseph is born. So we're now a year two hundred fifty one on our timeline. Joseph is born at two hundred fifty one, Joseph is appointed overseer in Egypt about two hundred eighty one, and that's the beginning of

1:36:43 the years of plenty. And then the famine begins in about two hundred and eighty-eight years after Abraham's birth. We get to about three hundred years. I'm gonna round a little bit here because it's it's not crucial to get fiddly. About three hundred years after Abraham's birth, Kohath is born. Kohath is the father of Amram. Amram is the father of Job. So the reason that I've included these additional names after Jacob is that with the birth of Kohath, the birth of Amram, and then the birth of Moses, we've established typical generational intervals at that time in that place for those for those sons. Just like we were talking about the Genesis 5 and the Genesis 11 intervals, they were all quite consistent.

1:37:30 Now, we don't know to what degree that was typical at the time or to what degree God supernaturally intervened. There's no reason to believe it wasn't typical, but the particulars of any given man you can't extrapolate, but you can average. On average it was about one hundred and thirty years in the Genesis eleven chronologies. That's perfectly fine. So since we know for a fact from the genealogies, they give specific begetting dates, exactly how much time passed from Jacob through Moses, we can assume that other men would have had similar generational intervals. Not identical, but similar, certainly in the ballpark. So what I have done privately, and I'm not going to publish this, but I'm just making the case for why these numbers I

1:38:18 think are absolutely plausible. And in fact, they're so plausible that concluding that this is not true becomes implausible. You'd have to shift the timelines radically to dismiss what I'm saying here. Assuming and this is the one big assumption in all of this, this is the one thing that is not established in scripture. We're not given the begetting dates of Esau's sons, certainly through Job. We're not told in Job forty-two or in Genesis thirty-six what the intervals were. But if we assume that they're comparable to the generations through Moses, then we would have Job being born in Edom 352 years after Abraham's death. That is the same year as Amaram is born, which is the assumption. So again, that's where the generational intervals are the same.

1:39:09 That's a complete assumption, but it's gonna be within a few years. You know, even if it's off by ten years, it doesn't change the conclusion of the argument they'll be making here. But I'm acknowledging this is the one place where we don't know. This is the one place where we cannot say this is accurate. But everything predicated on the assumption is going to be precise because we have all the rest of the dates in scripture. So if we assume that the intervals were the same for Job, then and this is also using the sixth generation timeline for Job not the five. As I mentioned a minute ago, I think that the telescoping past Ragul we have to treat as something that's being alighted, but that man also existed, and therefore would have a similar generational interval.

1:39:56 So I'm using the six generations and not the five that are five that are attested to in Job forty two. But I re-ran the numbers both ways and they work out pretty much either way. Assuming that there were six generations, which is from scripture with a minor caveat and assuming that the generations through Job from Esau were about the same, he's being born about the same time as Amram, which means that Job was born just before Joseph dies. This would put Job's trials beginning almost the same year that Moses is born. Assuming identical durations for Job and Amram, Job's trials would begin four hundred and twenty-two years after Abraham, and Moses is born four hundred and twenty-five years after Abraham.

1:40:42 So virtually the same time. So when Job's trials begin, he has been king for some time, like all this wealth, he's the king, his friends are kings. He's not a prince at this point. He's been in charge of Edom. He's been the king of Edom for some time. And remember the context from the beginning of Job, the discourse that occurs in the heavenly council, God holds Job forth as one of the most faithful men on the planet. He says there's none like him. And Job lived at the same time as Moses. While Moses was doing his thing in Egypt in slavery, along with all of the Hebrews, while they were all beleaguered and being beaten, and forced to do manual labor and killed unjustly and cruelly by the Egyptians?

1:41:29 Job Job was blessed immeasurably by God, and Job was the subject of discussion, where the devil said, Well, of course he gives you glory. You've erected a hedge around him, nothing bad happens to him. This is the consequence. This is what matters. Even if we're off by a few years of Job's birth, because Job was a great grandson of Esau, he lived about the same time. He lived, you know, couple countries over. Edom wasn't far away from Egypt at that time. They're not exactly neighbors, but it's not distant. Job was blessed, Joe is a powerful king. The Hebrews are in captivity. They are being tormented, they're being abused, they're being killed unjustly. That's a problem if you have a Jewish centric view of the

1:42:17 Old Testament. The deletion of Job existing at this time made it possible for us to forget that not only was Job a king, he was a specific king, he was a king of Edom, but when did he live? He lived at the same time as the Hebrews were being tormented. So moving ahead in this timeline that relates to Job, this is an absolute fact borne out from scripture to zero speculation here. Excess began 505 years after Abraham's birth. And then Israel attempts to pass through Edom, remember in Numbers twenty and Deuteronomy two, about thirty-nine to forty years later. Not sure precisely, I don't think, but it's at the very end of the Exodus. So this would be either be 544 or 545. We'll call 545 for the sake of roundness.

1:43:09 So five hundred forty five years after Abraham is born, in the year of Abraham, we have Moses going to the king of Edom, unnamed in both the Septuagint and the Rabbinic text. We have the King of Edom saying, You're not coming in. If you try, we're gonna kill you. And it's described in a couple different ways. I gave the paraphrase the numbers 20 description of the event. And I'm gonna read you the paragraph from Deuteronomy two. And we turned and departed into the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea as the Lord spoke to me, and we compassed Mount Seir many days. And the Lord said to me, You have compassed this mount long enough, turn therefore toward the north, and charge the people, saying, You

1:43:56 are going through the borders of your brothers, the children of Esau, who dwell in Seir, and they shall fear you and dread you greatly. Do not engage in war against them, for I will not give you of their land even to set your foot upon, for I have given Mount Seir to the children of Esau as an inheritance. So this is a small bit of context that's missing from Numbers 20, but it's crucial. One, God said go over there. And God said chronologically go over there right after Moses struck the rock. So, you know, Moses leaves us out of the retelling in Deuteronomy 2. But he does say God says go through there, go over there, and he says something that needs to be treated carefully because the text is obvious, but only if you're not being nitpicky.

1:44:47 God says you are going through the borders of your brothers, the children of Esau, which to us sounds like okay, going through the borders, I mean you're crossing the border, you're entering the country. In the original Greek text that's being translated by Brenton as through, that could just as easily say you are passing by, you are going alongside, or you are skirting the borders of your brothers. Any of those would be accurate, and true is also fine as long as you understand what's said just I think two verses later. I will not give you of their land even enough to set your foot upon. So again, the text itself makes clear that they didn't go into the land of Edom, but you just can't be lazy with the through

1:45:34 the borders and think, well, they entered into it because Numbers twenty says the same thing it says they didn't go in because the army was amassed, and Deuteronomy two says 'cause they were terrified. Edom was terrified of this giant mass of, you know, probably a couple million people, 'cause remember six hundred thousand men had of households, that's women and children and slaves, whatever they brought with them. Probably a couple million people came out of Egypt. That's a lot of people in any place at any time. Certainly no small matter in this time, especially when these people are desperate. And particularly when Job undoubtedly was familiar with what was going on among the Hebrews when they were in Egypt.

1:46:14 So, as I said, Scripture does not say that the king of Edom, who denies the Israelites' entry into Edom, doesn't say he's Job. But the Septuagint, which was deleted from the rabbinic text, says Job is a king of Edom at about this time. So the reason that I did all that timeline work that I'm I'm describing here is that assuming the generations of Job were similar to those of Moses, Job died nearly forty years after this. So it's basically impossible for the things to move around far enough, even assuming that my assumptions are not accurate, that I don't have the date pinpointed precisely. They would have to move so far in terms of generations by decades that it would cease to be plausible relative to the consistency

1:47:05 that we've seen in the other places where we are given generational intervals. Remember the Genesis 11 intervals were very consistently 130 years. And that's not to say the interval I'm using here is not exactly 130 years. The interval I'm using is approximately the same that he was through of Moses. So why would they edit Job? Why would they remove these small details? On top of all the massive changes that Corey mentioned earlier, the small detail of all his friends being kings, of him being a king, because if he's a king of Edom and he is descended from Esau, which you'd expect as a king of Edom, like Edomites, those are the Esau's grandkids. So that's a foregone conclusion. But Job being a believer, being the most blessed man on the

1:47:52 planet, above every living Hebrew, above Moses himself, above Moses and Aaron, whom God struck dead because of their disobedience, Job was not struck dead. He was given a double portion of what he had lost, including as many children again, because in the resurrection, he would have double the number of children. But livestock and all the things that aren't promised to be resurrected, it was doubled. He became twice as wealthy after his trials as before, because he was blessed by God because he was I don't think it's unreasonable to say uniquely faithful. This was occurring while the Hebrews were slaves to the Egyptians. If you were a god hating rabbi, is this something you might omit? To make a non Hebrew look better than you, more blessings,

1:48:43 more wealth, greater accolades from God in the very moment of their destitution and their humiliation. This is not a small matter. And so as I said, I'm not publishing the chart that I came up with because I don't stand by it a hundred percent in terms of its accuracy. It could be off by a few years. I absolutely stand by the precision of the internal workings. You'd have to come up with a preposterous interval for Job's generations after Esau for him not to be this king. In fact, I actually ran the numbers twice. I also ran them with the five generation interval where you have Job forty two saying the was five from Abram. Even though I don't believe that that is precise 'cause I think that that's skipping Ragul, and I think that's a very Christian conclusion

1:49:33 to reach. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that it's not six it's actually five, how do the numbers work out? Assuming identical generations, Job would be dying just three years before the end of the Exodus. So assuming exactly the same years between multiple generations of grandfathers, Job would have been just shortly dead, which I think makes it entirely believable that even in that scenario, which I don't agree with, I don't think it's realistic to delete Ragul. Even in that scenario, if you move the generations by just one year each, Job is the king again. That's how much of a margin of error there is for the assumptions I'm making. I'm not publishing it 'cause I don't think it's accurate, but it's

1:50:18 probably pretty close. And I do believe that there is no other reasonable conclusion. It's an inference, but I think it's a conclusion that any rational Christian who reads and can do math would reach the same conclusion. That Job was alive during the Exodus, he was alive during most of Moses' life, fact all of Moses' life. He lived longer, he was born before, and he died after. So his life entirely compassed Moses' life. He was more blessed. He was a more holy man, and he was not a descendant of Jacob, which means he wasn't an Israelite. This is a big problem if you have a Jewish supremacist view of the Old Testament, which is part of what dies when we readopt the Septuagint, as the early church held.

1:51:06 Another small detail, but I think one that's potentially interesting. Because of Moses' position in Egypt being very high up, and because Job was a neighboring king, this is complete speculation. This may not be true at all. But it's entirely reasonable to speculate that Moses and Job may have met politically. It may well have been the case that they would have been in the same place at the same time, probably Moses being sent to Job being sent to Edom as an emissary. That's completely speculative, but given the overlap of their lives, it's entirely possible it happened for political reasons. Totally unrelated to anything in scripture, but just because of Moses' placement in Egyptian life, it could have been the case.

1:51:51 That is how much overlap there is. So please don't quote me on that because that's it may or may not be true. We have no possible way to know. But they certainly lived at the same time and they absolutely lived at the same time. That's beyond any shadow of a doubt. And it's almost certain that Job had to be the king in Numbers twenty and in Deuteronomy two. That is a radical retelling of those stories of the omission that was made from the Greek. So this is the reason we're including this in the timeline episode here. Think about how wild that is to have this man suddenly have a place and a purpose, and have land given to him. This is last thing that I'll draw from this text I don't think we've really ever taken seriously before.

1:52:39 Listen again to what God said of Job of the Edomites in Deuteronomy two. Do not engage in war against them, for I will not give you of their land, even to set your foot upon, for I have given Mount Seir to the children of Esau as an inheritance. And then in verse nine, shortly thereafter, God says again, do not quarrel with the Moabites, and do not engage with in war with them, for I will not give you of their land for an inheritance, for I have given Error to the children of Lot to inherit. The reason that these two throwaway verses matter so much is that this is exactly what Acts seventeen twenty six says. How often in Corrie and I have we mentioned where God says and he made from one man every nation of mankind to live

1:53:29 on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way towards him and find him. God gave the Moabites their land. God gave the Edomites their land. God spoke to Job. Job was a Christian. And given the conduct of Job's friends, the kings of the neighboring countries, we have every reason to believe that they were Christians too. They were poor, certainly theologically. The conclusion of Job is that God required a sacrifice and prayer from Job so that he would not kill his friends because of their sin against him. But while they were speaking, they were not speaking pagan blasphemies against

1:54:15 God. They were spouting bad theology. Better theology than most of our pastors to day, less blasphemous things than you hear from most pulpits today, nevertheless warranting death from God. Yet for the sake of Job's prayer, God forgave them. That means that all those neighboring countries were Christian too for a time. It was all lost. All those countries eventually apostatized. Edom, certainly, if not chiefly, as bad as any, because what we see from Edom later by the time the first time they had malicious conflict is in the days of the kings of Israel. By then, the Edomites were truly wicked and depraved. They had lost the faith of their fathers, but crucially, their fathers had the faith of Abraham.

1:54:59 Their fathers had the Christian faith. Job's in heaven 'cause he's a Christian. Job was never a Jew. As we've been going through these different sections of the Old Testament, you may have noticed that there is a theme to some of the edits that the rabbis made to the text, and I will get into this more with three main types of edits they made, changes they made to the text, and my conclusion. There's one salient one here in Job that I want to cover before we move on to Esther. And that is from back in Job chapter two, verse three. I'll read first from the Masoretic text and then from the Septuagint. And the Lord said to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and

1:55:50 upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason. And then from the Septuagint. And the Lord said to the devil, Have you given heed then to my servant Job, that there is no one like him upon the earth, a man who is innocent, truthful, blameless, God fearing, keeping far from every evil, and still he has his integrity, though you sought to destroy his possessions to no purpose. This is one of the changes, one of the types of changes we see so often in the Masoretic text, in the rabbinic text. They diminish the role of God, and even go so far as to make God seem capricious. You may remember some instances of that from the episode we did

1:56:42 on the wisdom literature. This is just another one of those. There is a difference between God saying that Satan sought to destroy Job, and of course God permitted it, we don't deny that, because everything is in God's hands, and any evil that occurs God has permitted it by not stopping it. But there is a difference between that and saying, you incited me. The rabbinic text gives to Satan a power he does not have, and diminishes God in a way that is utterly impermissible. This is one of those verses that causes many Christians to struggle because it seems like Satan almost manipulated God into doing something. That problem simply evaporates when you read the actual text of Job, because it's not there.

1:57:31 It's something that was added impermissibly, wickedly by the rabbis. And so for the final section of this episode, we will be going Be going over in fairly large part, actually, the Book of Esther. This episode, as you may have guessed, or if you actually looked at the runtime, is going to be a little bit long, perhaps making up for some past episodes we skipped, but this is just one of those episodes where there's a great deal to cover, and I can already say that what we're going to cover in Esther is not trivial, either in terms of the content or in terms of the volume of it. Because the Book of Esther, as it is in the Masoretic text, is simply a fundamentally different work from the Book of Esther in

1:58:22 the actual Old Testament. The Book of Esther in the Masoretic Text is a book that has caused many Christians to wrestle, to struggle down through the centuries. Luther did not like the Book of Esther. Now it's worth noting that some of the quotes attributed to Luther come from his table talks, those are unreliable, and there are others where Latin translators confuse the book Esdras with the book Esther, which is scripture. But even setting those aside, Luther was not fond of Esther. The great The great irony is that Luther was right and wrong simultaneously. He was right because he was reading the rabbinic text, and he couldn't find God because the rabbis removed God and But he also could have just read the Greek.

1:59:19 He could have read the Septuagint, and then all of those problems would have been resolved. Because in the Septuagint, the book of Esther is a thoroughly Christian book. And as we'll mention, one of the great ironies is that the Jews actually look pretty good in the book of Esther. They don't look so good in the Rabbinic text because the Rabbinic text is basically a revenge fantasy of the Jews. That's what they did. They took scripture and turned it into a revenge fantasy. Even the best construction of Esther in the Masoretic text. It is a secular book. It is a book about court intrigue, it is a book about international, incidentally politics, slightly less international than in the correct reading in

2:00:02 the Septuagint. We'll get into that. But it is a different thing. It is not a spiritual book. It is not a Christian book. And so our ancestors, back through the ages in the church, were right to question why is this in scripture? Should this be in Scripture? Is this Scripture? The answer is assuredly yes, when you actually read the text of Scripture, when you pay attention to what God has actually preserved in his Word, instead of what the rabbis edited and handed to us. Because God is all over the Septuagint version. There are prayers to God, the name of God is there, which is something that is notably absent from the Masoretic text. There are explanations of what's going on in this book, the letters

2:00:54 that are referenced in certain places in the Masoretic text are actually present, preserved for us, in the Greek text. This is a fundamentally different book. They are not comparable between the two. There are places in the Old Testament and elsewhere where the differences aren't that great. There are some places where the rabbinic text and the Greek text are identical. Just different languages, and you know you have to read the rabbinic text in the right way, add in those vowels. This is not one of those. This is again a wholly different book in the Greek versus the so-called Hebrew. And we are poorer in the church for the fact that we have been using the edited to be charitable rabbinic text for so

2:01:47 long. There are a number of main differences, which is to say there are sections which the rabbis just deleted. This is one of the cases in which they were certainly a little bit more blunt with their use of their instruments. Because there are six sections that are simply absent. They deleted them wholesale from the Greek when they were creating the Rubinic text. We will go over those in part. We're not going to read them in whole because we'd basically be reading almost the entire book of Esther if we did that. As Cory mentioned about Luther and I mentioned in I think the last episode, one of the recent episodes, I made a comment that I want to withdraw. I said that Luther did not want to translate it at all

2:02:35 because he didn't believe that it should be in the Bible He was not a fan, but the thing that I said is a story that I've heard my whole life, you know, well before the internet. But as I was doing some more research, I found a page. There's a guy, his blog is called Beggars All Reformation. He's some reformed guy that for whatever reason has been meticulously documenting stuff said about Luther for decades now. And he's very good at digging up original sources, finding the genealogies of every single claim that have ever been made about Luther and a number of other guys. He goes into great detail in the origins of the story of the claim that Luther wanted to remove Esther from the Bible. I don't remember the specifics of how far back it went, but

2:03:21 what he wrote changed my mind to the point I can't say confidently what I said previously. So consider this a retraction of my claim, I don't want someone to go around repeating it because of what I said. I it could still be right, and maybe this blogger is wrong, but he's very good at looking this stuff up. I can't cite it truthfully anymore, even if it is still accurate. I think it's important to note that even if it's fake, even if that's an apocryphal story, which it may or may not be, it's entirely believable because Esther is so bad. There is not a single mention of God in the entire book. It is literally a godless book in our Bibles. So this has long been observed. And that was part of the perhaps, perhaps not apocryphal claims about

2:04:08 Luther's view of it. But But I think the fact that there is such a radical difference between the Septuagint and what the rabbis did to Aster, that the fact that such a claim is believable is a big part of the story. If Luther said and did that, he would have been entirely justified in doing so. But I can't stand by the claim that that w occurred. So maybe it did, maybe it doesn't. We'll put a link in the show notes to that so you can have that referred to as well. One other thing that I'll note before we get into the textual differences themselves. The three great once that we've talked about earlier, the Greek codices of the entire Bible. The so-called B-text. They call it the B-text because they think it's probably a little

2:04:54 bit newer in terms of when it was actually recorded physically. Those are Cyanaticus and Vaticanus. The B-text of Esther, which also includes Papyrus nine sixty seven, which is dates from the late second century, so a couple of years older than the Ansials. And then we have the so called A Text, which is now Xandrinus, that's slightly shorter, but not remotely to the same degree as the rabbinic changes. It has the same content that we're going to talk about here. So in effect, all three, actually four versions of the Greek text that we can refer to have what we're talking about here. They are attested to for 1800 years. Esther, interestingly, if you care about the Qumran Caves, which we said

2:05:44 previously you shouldn't, but it's notable that Esther's not in there at all, one way or another. The book literally isn't present. Both Josephus and Jerome attest to the rabbinic form of Esther. So what we find in the Masoretic text in 1000 AD was not brand new a thousand years ago. It was in use at the time of Josephus soap two thousand years ago. What is interesting about Jerome is that despite how much he despised the Septuagint, enough to go all this extra work to learn Hebrew and doctor Abbis 'cause I already knew Greek, to do all this extra work just to throw out the Greek, he still was basically forced to include these so called additions to Esther in the Vulgate. Now what Jerome did that's been repeated since Jerome by some but

2:06:40 not all Roman Catholic Bibles was what we're going to talk about here, the so-called additions, appear at the end. If you're looking at one of the Roman Catholic Bibles in English that are based on the Vulgate and preserve Jerome's ordering, what you will find is the Protestant rabbinic version of Esther that we're familiar with, it's totally godless. And then at the end of it, just tacked on to a very short chapter, otherwise incidentally, the so called editions are just stuck there at the end. Where they make no sense chronologically, like bits of the story appearing at the end as an appendix in narrative wise is totally nonsensical. But many Roman Catholic churches preserve what Jerome did, but even Jerome

2:07:27 included them. Jerome did not delete them, even though the rabbis deleted them. He basically his hand was forced and he put him in there, but he stuck him at the end. There are actually, thankfully, some Roman Catholic Bibles that not only include the full text of Esther, but they put it in the correct places in the story. Because chapter one verse one is something that is only present in the Greek. Where Esther begins in our Bibles, if you're Protestants, is not where Esther begins. There's a bunch of stuff before that. Just like in Job, there's a bunch of stuff at the end that got chopped off. So Esther, I think, is a particularly interesting case. I'll pop top all the changes we're going to get into for

2:08:08 the fact that Protestantism is uniquely positioned as rejecting entirely what is scriptural. We screwed up badly. We listened to rabbis when we should have listened to God. And as a result, we ended up with a totally godless book in our Bibles. We'll put a link in a show notes to a yet another blog post. This is probably gonna have more show notes than a lot lately. A page dedicated to Esther that also goes through this stuff kind of line by line showing you where stuff was removed and added with some commentaries. That'll be very helpful as you're trying to get your bearings. It's a link I've shared on X a number of times. And it's mind blowing. Like what we're gonna talk about here next is absolutely mind blowing

2:08:47 how it's not the same book. It's not the same book, it's not the same story. There's nothing about what we know about Esther that's true. Even some of the specific details were changed where the text is the same. There are changes made to the details that render it worse, less Christian. The way you will hear these things referred to in scholarship, and we're going to mention it just so if you want to go Google this stuff, you can follow along with us, is a problem of framing. There are six so-called additions to Esther. There's additions A through F. These additions are present in the Septuagint, they're not present in the rabbinic text. Now, of course, it's begging the question to call them additions because

2:09:30 that assumes that they were added in the Greek and not that they were subtracted from the rabbinic text, which is blatantly the case. Like the story changes, it finally makes sense. It's finally a godly Christian book. Once you see the intact Greek text translated in English. Like yeah, this is a great book. As we said, it actually makes the Jews look really good. If all we were trying to do is make Jews look bad, we would keep the version of Esther that they sold us. It's not a good book. And unfortunately for five centuries, because Protestants listen to the rabbis' lies, they have been coming up with excuses for how vile Esther is. It's always rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, not everybody.

2:10:13 Some people, oh, it's I love it. it's it's so great. It's totally godless and full of murder. It's great. That is Jews terraforming our souls. So contending with this is going to be contending with five centuries of Protestant theologians not listening to the voice of God and making profound errors downstream. They're gonna make arguments that say things that were convincing and Enough for people that Esther was left in our Bibles to this day. Esther has a rifle and high place in the Old Testament. And when it's intact, it's right where it should be. Just want you to remember, we'll probably call these additions throughout. I will try to call them subtractions because that's what they are. These are deletions from God's Word.

2:10:58 These are deletions that will incur the wrath of Revelation twenty two. But when we refer to addition A through F, just know that that's what's going on. They're chunks. Entire chunks are just deleted. Pages gone. Not like a couple sentences. Entire chapters effectively have been deleted from Esther. So So the what are usually called additions, but and should in fact be called subtractions, there are six of them A through F is how they are typically labeled in the Bibles that include them. A is A is Mordecai's dream, which is a foretelling of things to come. He doesn't necessarily understand all of it at the time, but he understands it later, which comes into a later subtraction. B is the full text of the King's decree pursuant to the

2:11:47 request of Haman, Haman, however you want to pronounce his name, it hardly matters. Section C contains prayers. And this is a very key difference, a rather important difference between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, because of course, there's no real prayer of any kind in the Masoretic text, in the Rabbinic text. It's just fasting and it's a focus on this scheming and the court intrigue. But here you have Mordecai and Esther both calling on God. A fundamentally different thing from the rabbinic text. Then you have a description in D of Esther's approach to the king, and you have the behavior of the king. These things are different from how they are portrayed in the Masoretic text, because of course the rabbis wanted to minimize the role of

2:12:39 the king and also the piousness, the piety of the king. They wanted to make him seem like some foreign tyrant instead. And then in E, you have the full text of the second decree, which is overturning the one from Haman, and that is the one that goes out to all of the provinces, the leaders in the provinces. You have the full text of that in the Septuagint. The Masoretic text just says that it exists, basically, summarizes it instead of getting the text of it. And then the final subtraction is Mordecai's interpretation. This is sort of the conclusion to the book labeled F, attributing these things to God, praising God for what he has done, and again interpreting that dream that we see in A, which is a

2:13:23 vision from God, Mordecai is essentially a very minor prophet in this sense. So those are the changes Changes between the actual Word of God, the Septuagint, the Greek of Esther, and the Masoretic text. These are the six things that they deleted. There are other changes as well, of course, because they couldn't help themselves, they made pervasive little changes to the text, but these are the big ones. Like I said before, we are not going to read all of these in their fullness because it would basically be reading the entire book of Esther to you. We will include links to these, and of course you can find them in any Bible that includes the full book of Esther, which would mean any translation of the Septuagint, a number of Roman Catholic

2:14:07 Bibles, and some others as well, because there are some Protestant Bibles to there's no such thing really as a Roman Catholic versus the Protestant Bible, but there are some Protestant Bibles that do include these subtractions, these things that should be there. But as I said, A is basically just his dream, his vision of what is going to come, and it sets up what actually happens in the book of Esther. It helps to explain some of these things. And it also helps to place this firmly within Scripture and under God's guidance. God is the one who is organizing, guiding the action in this book, just as He is down through the pages of history, and in all the other books of Scripture. We just don't have that in the Masoretic text because the rabbis

2:14:55 decided they wanted to make it into something else, and as Woe said, with great irony, made themselves look worse in the process. But beginning then with chapter one, I will read a couple of verses. I'm just going to read them from the Septuagint. I'm not going to bother with the Masoretic version. I will compare it in my commentary instead. And so starting with verse seventeen. In fact he detailed for them the words of the queen and how she had opposed the king. Therefore as she had opposed King Asweris, so today the rest of the princesses are the rulers of the Persians and the Medes, having heard the things that were said by her before the king, will dare likewise to dishonor their husbands.

2:15:34 Of course this is subsequent to if you're familiar with the book of Esther you'll know immediately, but this is subsequent to the king during his great feast, his great banquet, requesting that Queen Vashti come and basically present herself before the nobles, and she refuses him, and she actually denigrates the king. So it goes above and beyond what is contained in the Masoretic. Because the Masoretic basically just says that she snubbed him. Here she actually does things that are completely impermissible. Obviously, in this cultural context and almost any cultural context with regard to a king. But the reason for that removal from because she is, of course, removed as the queen, that's how Esther winds up being the queen.

2:16:15 The reason for the removal isn't given in the Masoretic text. You just sort of have this summary description of affairs, and then suddenly the king is looking for a new queen. In the Septuagint, it gives us the reason that Vashti is removed because she snubs and insults the king. She's basically inviting this. It's essentially treason, and in some ancient cultures it would in fact be treason. The concern here in the Septuagint, the way that this is worded, is it primarily about rulers and their wives, because the queen will be seen as an example for other wives to rebel? The Masoretic Text changes this and makes it so that it's with regard to all women and their husbands. For the queen's behavior will be made known to all women, causing

2:17:00 them to look at their husbands with contempt is how that's worded in the rabbinic text. Now notably this is of course expanded later in the same chapter in verse twenty, because in the Septuagint it says all the women will show honor to their men. So there is that concern there as well. But this is just another case where the rabbis have made a tweak to the text, in addition to all those subtractions we already mentioned. So for me, subtraction A is really a big deal because it completely frames in a Christian way what book we're dealing with here. Uh the book opens with a dream of Mardecaus or Mordecai in the second year of the king. I'm gonna say Artaxerxes. Yeah. I'm gonna say Artaxerxes because I can't pronounce the other one,

2:17:44 even though it's like it's important because there is actually a king Artaxerxes and we're not going to get into the historical context of whether it's Xerxes or Artaxerxes, because it sort of changes what else is going on in the world when this specifically is happening. But it is material. That's like you said, this could be a six-hour episode by itself. The dream that Mardecaeus has includes two great dragons emerging and their cries summoning nations for battle against the nation of righteousness. So this nation cries out to God and is saved by a small spring that becomes a great river. The subtraction here also places Mardecaus in the king's court from the beginning and has him uncover a plot against the king by the

2:18:28 two eunuchs before Esther becomes queen. This is crucial because this is part of Amon's motive against the Jews. When you look at the rabbinic text later on, when Amon comes after them, he seems to just be really mean and spiteful and he wants to kill them, but there's not a clear motive, apart from him just being terrible. What is made clear by the subtraction A is the Mordecaius interrupted by God's vision, a plot that Amon had against Arta Xerxes. So Corey said, like there's a lot of political intrigue here, but it's not the main story. It's the framework. And the crucial thing about subtraction A is that with this vision in these events, it reframes the entire story as being part of a fulfillment of divine prophecy, which is incidentally where it ends up.

2:19:17 The book The book ends with a subtraction of Mardecaus' prayer describing what happened. Once we know what has happened, it bookends perfectly that God was in control the whole time. So we go from a book where God is not mentioned once, where there's not a single prayer, to God's direct intervention, incidentally in what we're told as a pagan kingdom. Arta Xerxes undoubtedly had idolatry and all sorts of things going on, just as incidentally King Josiah did when he was a godly king. That sort of syncretism and polytheism is not uncommon. This doesn't justify me. I'm not by any stretch saying it's okay to be a polytheist. Anyone who doesn't hate me knows that. But when we look at the actual text of Esther, what we

2:20:06 find is that our deserts he says a whole bunch of stuff that's Christian. Now I don't know if that means he's in heaven, but in this moment in this story in contact with God's people, and these were a called Jews at this time, the word that's used in the Greek text calls them Jews. They were godly people. They look good. They were blameless. We as Christians have to love and embrace that. So the fact that it's totally gutted is I mean it's darkly ironic, and it's evil because they're messing with scripture. But when you're dealing with these subjects where they're accusations of racism and all this stuff, well, let's just let God talk. If God says something good about some people, it's true.

2:20:46 If he says something bad, it's true. In this case, from the very beginning, God is in control, protecting his people while also working with whom we're told are pagans, as we're you know told Job should have been a pagan, his friends should have been pagans, except somehow they knew God. Well, turns out that they knew God because they spoke to him. It's worth making a minor note here. The word that is used in the Greek is the one that we've of course been using all along for Judean, it can rightly be translated Jew as well, as we went over in the episode on that specific issue. But of course, part of the reason for this is because of the timeline and where we're dealing with expulsions and dispersions of the

2:21:30 northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. And so of course here we're dealing with those who were taken from the southern kingdom of Judah. That's why they're present in this court. Because they've been expelled from the land because of the wickedness of their forefathers. The next example, then, of some changes here, I'll skip over two five because that's the one that essentially highlights the difference here between the ESV and others which always translate this as Jew and the literal word in the Greek which perhaps could more properly be Judean. But moving on to verse seven of still chapter two. And he had a foster child, the daughter of Abbail, the brother of his father, and her name was Esther.

2:22:13 Now when her parents died he raised her for himself as a wife, and the maiden was beautiful. This one's perhaps somewhat of an odd change the rabbis decided to make, but the fact that Esther is being raised by Mordecai to be his wife is simply dropped from the rabbinic text Which isn't necessarily a major change, but it certainly is a change in the nuance and the nature of the story. Because Mordecai, who is raising Esther to be his future wife, gives her up to the king to be his wife. That changes the story to some degree. Again, not a major change, but it is a change the rabbis decided to make. And as we said earlier in the episode, just because something is not a major change, or doesn't seem like a major change, doesn't

2:23:02 mean that it is something we can just accept. The next example is verse 20 from still in chapter 2. This is a great example, another great example of the Jews, the rabbis simply removing God from the book of Esther. And so I will read first from the rabbinic text in this case, and then second from the Septuagint. Esther had not made known her kindred or her people as Mordecai had commanded her, for Esther obeyed Mordecai just as when she was brought up by him. And now from the Septuagint, and Esther had not revealed her country, for Mordecai had commanded her to fear God and to keep his commandments, as when she was with him, and Esther did not change her way of life. Esther and Mordecai are both shown here to be righteous, to be

2:23:51 pious. They fear God and keep his commandments. Mordecai teaches her to do that, she continues to do that despite now being in the king's harem. That's simply removed. The rabbis just removed the fact that both of these key players in this story are faithful. They're both Christians. This is one of those cases where the rabbis made themselves look worse, made the Jews look worse by removing this, because ultimately their goal wasn't necessarily to make the Jews look good. They were doing something fundamentally different with this book. Again, part of it is they just wanted to make this into a revenge fantasy. The Jews get to destroy those who don't like them. Which you may have noticed. One of the things that they removed is there's some irony here,

2:24:40 of course, because of the way that the characters work in this particular story, but they remove the reason that Haman hates them. You may be thinking of a Russian proverb right now. I don't even Don't even need to say it, and if you don't know what it is, you can go and look it up a little Easter egg hunt for some of you, but that's exactly what's happening here. The Jews have removed the reason this man does not like them. Now it happens to be in this case, he hates them for a reason that is a bad reason. But they did the same thing that they do in so many other cases. It's almost as if they can't help themselves. They are compelled to do it. Despite the fact that in this case, it makes them look worse.

2:25:22 Because the reason that he hated them was because Mordecai had done something good. Mordecai had been faithful to his king. He had actually been a faithful advisor, a faithful member of the king's court. They still removed that in order to make it seem like Haman just hated them because they were Judeans, because they were Israelites, and so he wanted to destroy them because of that. And of course we all recognize the reason they would want to make that edit. Because then they can say look at this, all these non Jews have always hated us and wanted to destroy us simply because we're Jews. In this case, if they just left in the reason, everyone would say, yeah, of course, that's that's a bad thing they want

2:26:04 to destroy you. But it would be because they were Christian, because they were faithful, not because they were Jews. And crucially, because God gave a vision to Mardecaeus in order to protect Artaxerxes. Remember, this was a coup against Artaxerxes that was deleted from the beginning. God protected this pagan king through Mardecaus. That's, I think, the real reason. It wasn't simply that he was doing something good and godly, is that God was intervening in this other kingdom. God intervenes in the kingdoms of the world. They're not always going to be the ones that we think of as being believers. And for whatever reason, we don't have to introspect God's reasons to believe the fact that heath said to Mardecaius, here's a vision, you're

2:26:53 going to protect this king for his purposes, for God's purposes. That was too much for them to bear. In subtraction B, which is after the rabbinic chapter three, verse thirteen. This section provides the full text of the royal edict that Arta Xerxes sent out commanding the destruction of the Jews. Now in the Rabbinic text, this letter which was drafted by Amon is described, and yet in the Septuagint, the letter is quoted in full. We're not going to read the whole thing for time, but I want to read an excerpt from the middle of it because it slapped me in the face when I read it, particularly for its deletion. This was a letter written by Artaxerxes the King, sent out to all hundred twenty seven satraps and whatever.

2:27:40 Amon who excels in soundness of judgment among us and has been manifestly fully well inclined without wavering and with unshaken fidelity, and has obtained a second post in the kingdom, informed us that a certain ill-disposed people is mixed up with all the tribes throughout the world, opposed in their law to every other nation, and continually neglecting the commands of the king, so that the united government blamelessly administered by us is not quietly established. Having then conceived that this nation alone of all others is continually set in opposition to every man, introducing as a change a foreign code of laws in injuriously plotting to accomplish the worst of evils against our interests, and against the happy establishment of the monarchy.

2:28:23 That's right in the middle, but it's a portion that's specifically describing the nature and the conduct of the Jews. Now I highlight this for a couple reasons. One, at the end of the section that was deleted by the rabbis, Mardecaus cries out with a loud voice A nation that has done no wrong is going to be destroyed. So it is scriptural that the accusations of Amon or Haman against the Jews were categorically false in this place and time. So isn't it weird that that would be deleted? If Marde Caius is telling the truth that a nation that has done no wrong is going to be destroyed, well, I mean that's consistent with the text we were left with. So why not leave in all these terrible things that Amon said

2:29:06 about them that Artaxerxes sent out because he believed what his advisor said? Well, remember what's said in first Thessalonians two? For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen, as they did from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus Christ and the prophets and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind by hindering us from speaking to the nations so that they might be saved. That's not an exact parallel, but it immediately came to mind. Because what Amon describes is what the Jews do almost everywhere. It's certainly what they've been doing for the last two thousand years. In every country they've gone to, Amon's description of them was absolutely true. So I think that's a probably the reason that the rabbis

2:29:50 deleted it, even though Mardecaus said we're not guilty of anything, and I believe that as a Christian completely, they were not guilty of undermining King Artaxerxes. Which tells us something also about the kingdom in which they lived. If If God was commending them for upholding that nation rather than subverting it, that tells us something about their hosts. They weren't quite as awful as we're told they were. And not as awful. Again, I'm not blessing him and saying the entire country is Christian at this point. I'm simply saying that if you look at the rabbinic text of Esther, you think those were monsters. As Artaxerx is a complete jerk. Just murdering everyone. Jews had to were all on their own.

2:30:33 When the reality is that I think what Amon said of them was well known, I don't think he was lying, except in this moment. I think we have every reason to believe, based on the entirety of human history, that the description of Amon here that was deleted is true, except for this one time. In this place, they were not doing these things. And so their murder was in fact murder. It wasn't just killing of rebels. It was unjust killing of God's people who were blameless. This of all the deletions, I think, probably struck me the most simply for that. the the one time that something terrible is said about them that isn't true, they couldn't bear to leave it in. Because at any other point in human history, if you read that,

2:31:19 if it had been read later on, when they deleted, 'cause remember, we only have this preserved because it's in the Septuagint. The rabbis had to come along later and delete it. When would they have deleted it? When their people were doing these very things in other nations? It would have been a double indictment of them to read Amon's words, and not only would it throw into question the god, the true god of Esther, but it would be a reminder that yeah, these people are up to no good in all times and all places. Except for this once. Esther's a beautiful book because the Jews were actually doing good things. I agree with Cory, like the word is fraught, but Jews, Judeans, these were God's people, they're Israelites, they're part of Israel at this

2:31:59 point, they're part of the Hebrew lineage. I think it's fine to call 'em Jews, particularly in this case where they were in captivity, which was their state for the rest of time. Okay, that if they did something good, we give them credit for it, and yet the rabbis deprived us of that opportunity because in every other place and time Amon's words were true. There is an interesting linguistic note in the Greek of verse three eight chapter three verse eight. The word that is used there in the Greek that is generally translated scattered abroad or dispersed something like that, could actually be translated diasporod, because the word there is diaspiro, which is the source from which we get diaspora.

2:32:50 It is a description of the punishment the Jews have received for their faithlessness. The rabbis changed that in their version, and the word that they use is just scattered or dispersed. It is not diasporate. It does not have that full sense that we have retained in the Greek. It makes some sense why they'd want to change that one. The next example is just another one of those examples where the rabbis simply deleted God. This is chapter four, verse eight, read first from the Rabbinic text. Mordecai also gave him a copy of the written decree issued in Susa for their destruction, that he might show it to Esther and explain it to her, and command her to go to the king to beg his favour, and plead with him on behalf of her

2:33:37 people. And now from the Septuagint. He also gave him the copy of the letter that had been published in Susa concerning their destruction to show to Esther, and he told him to command her to go in and entreat the king. Beg him for our people, remember your days of low estate, how you were sustained by my hand because Haman, who is second to the king, has spoken against us for death. Call upon the Lord and speak to the king for us, to deliver us from death. The rabbinic text simply deletes God and the Septuagint includes it, in keeping with the fact that Mordecai is a righteous man, he instructs Esther to call upon the Lord, because he believes firmly that the deliverance for his people if it should come will be from the

2:34:23 Lord. This section, this subtraction C is one of the most religious sections of what they deleted. Marques' prayer, he explains his refusal to bow to Amon. It was not out of arrogance, it was because he wouldn't give glory to God due to God to any mortal. So Mardecus prayed for God to remember God's covenant and to save his people. That's a Christian prayer. Remember they were carrying the promise of the Christ. That was the point of the bloodline, that was the point of the preservation of Scripture, was the promise made to Abraham was going to be fulfilled in the future. And so Marticas' prayers for the sake of the promise you made Abraham, preserve your people now. Because if you know, in effect if we're finished off, then it

2:35:11 means you haven't kept your promise. Do it because you're God. And I think Esther's prayer here in Subtraction C dramatically alters her character. She expresses deep distress at her situation. She says she detests the bed of the uncircumcised, and abores the sign of her high rank, that is her crown, which she wears only when necessary. She affirms her adherence to Jewish law, that is not eating at Aamon's table, and she pleads with God to give her courage to save her people. And And part of this prayer I think is crucial and probably one of the most important reasons why this whole thing was deleted. Esther prays in part, and now we have sinned before you and you have delivered us into the hands of our enemies, because we

2:35:56 honored their gods. You are righteous, O Lord. And so what just happened? Esther's admitting that they were idolaters. Which is why I said earlier there's undoubtedly polytheism going on with Artaxerxes lands, then go figure, no surprise at all. The problem is that the Jews were participants. They were worshiping foreign gods here while they were ruled by Artaxerxes. They were adopting the customs of the people there. Does this surprise any Christian? No. They did this every time they went anywhere. They adopted the demon gods of the local lands, they infuriated God, which here is why they're in captivity in the first place. They wouldn't captivity if they'd still been obeying God. That never happened.

2:36:38 The chastisement, the temporal punishment for the wickedness of apostasy shows up physically. They get carted off, they get sent to other lands, and yet even here God is still looking after them. But Esther acknowledges their idolatry. She acknowledges they've been worshiping foreign gods. They've been worshiping demons. The Jews were worshiping demons. So I say they look good, I don't mean they look perfect, but what's the problem here? This makes our Xerxes look bad, doesn't it? Like this is what I'm trying to highlight, like who looks good and who looks bad. When you change the content, when you change the text of a story, what could What conclusions are altered? Artaxerxes is overseeing a land that has pagans and has God's people.

2:37:23 And God's people are saying, yeah, we stopped worshiping you, or we didn't exclusively worship you, God, which is effectively the same thing. And for that confession to come from Esther shapes the whole thing. And then subtraction D even doubles down as it were on Esther's faithfulness in this, because that one starts with Then it happened on the third day when she had ceased praying, she took off the garments of her service and put on her glorious clothes, and having become resplendent, after she had called upon God, the overseer and Saviour of all, she took her two devoted slaves, and she leaned upon one, as though she were delicate, and the other one followed bearing her train. We go from a book that in the rabbinic text doesn't

2:38:10 even mention God, to a book where we have the words she called upon God the overseer and saviour of all. This is a thoroughly Christian book in the Septuagint, whereas again it is just some sort of political revenge fantasy in the Masoretic text. You also have a change in sort of if not necessarily the nature, then the overall character of the king in this case. And I would just recommend that you actually read the entirety of this book. Again, it will be linked in the show notes. You should read this and notice the difference in how the king is portrayed in the actual book versus what the rabbis did to his character, and how he is portrayed and even slandered in the Masoretic text. There's one crucial detail that we do need to highlight.

2:39:11 In the rabbinic text, Esther is just standing, she stands in the court, she finds favor, and the king extends a scepter. It's much shorter. What we find in the Septuagint is that when she's accompanied by her By her two maids, she's overcome with terror, she sees the king and is intimidating royal splendor, and she faints. Arta Xerxes is initially enraged, and then this is a quote But God changed the spirit of the king to gentleness, and an intense feeling he sprang from off his throne and took her into his arms until she recovered. God caused Artaxerxes' heart to soften in engendered love for his queen in the moment when he'd been infuriated at her behavior, fainting, whatever. He was angry, she was terrified, and when he saw her swoon,

2:40:00 he rushed to her, embraced her and basically nursed her back to consciousness, to having her wits about her. And God moved him to do that. What does it say about our Xerxes if God is moving his heart to have love for Esther. Do you understand now why these things might be deleted by the rabbis? It fundamentally changes the nature of what's going on. If God is working to protect Artaxerxes in his kingdom, if God is working in his heart, that says something about the man and about his kingdom and about his nation. And just as we continue with the vision at the beginning that they deleted, God's divine intervention is direct and explicit throughout this entire book. The next example we have is from chapter seven, this is verse nine,

2:40:53 and I will just read that from the Septuagint. Then Bugatha, one of the eunuchs of the king, said, Behold, Haman prepared a pole for Mordecai, who spoke on behalf of the king, and a pole fifty cubits high has been set up at the house of Haman, and the king said, Let Haman be crucified upon it. This is an interesting note because if you are familiar with Esther in the Rabbinic text, you will note there's a pretty significant change in verb here. The verb that is present in the rabbinic text is hanged. Let Haman be hanged on this gallows that he has constructed. Here in the Greek it says crucified, and this is in fact a punishment that was practiced by these people. It very clearly it is the verb crucify, it is literally the

2:41:47 verb for crucify. It's not an interpretation decision, it's not how we decide to exegete this. That is simply what it says. It is curious that the rabbis would go ahead and remove a reference to that. Now, perhaps it's not anything that's explicitly Christological here because you're crucifying a wicked man, and the righteous man escapes in this case, which of course is the opposite of what happens in the case of Christ, because the murderer is let free and Christ is crucified, but the rabbis still felt compelled to remove this reference to a punishment that they knew had taken place, something that they had explicitly called for, and then called down the curse of that righteous man's blood

2:42:34 on their heads. Just an interesting grammatical point that they changed this one verb. The next subtraction is subtraction E we mentioned is the second decree from the king dealing with Haman's wickedness and the actions that flowed from that, I'll read the first part of that because it contains a key point here. For when Haman the son of Hamadatha, a Macedonian, who was in truth a foreigner to Persian blood, and standing far apart from our kindness, though having been hospitable to us, obtained the benevolence that we hold for every nation to such degree, that he was publicly proclaimed as our father, and continuing as the second face from the royal throne. He was worshipped by all. It goes on and so forth and explains his wickedness and his

2:43:23 subversion and what he was attempting to do. And then that he asks with ingenious deceptions of stratagems he asks for the destruction of the Jews in order to transfer the dominion of the Persians to the Macedonians. This is fundamentally different from what we have in the rabbinic text, because in the rabbinic text they call Haman an agagite. And you may wonder what on earth is an agagite. Well, Agag is one of the kings mentioned in the Old Testament, one of the kings that initially the people of Israel failed to destroy. And then later on, they go ahead and destroy him under Saul. It's actually Samuel who kills him, but nonetheless, that's under King Saul. Part of the reason that this is relevant is because the

2:44:20 Jews still view this today as their conflict. They view themselves as attempting to destroy certain Old Testament figures and they link those Old Testament figures figures usually to Christendom, usually explicitly to the Christian, the white Christian West. And this is one of those cases because this is a king of those people that they view still today as their enemies. And so they changed what is very clearly calling this man a Macedonian, which is to say he's a Greek, attempting to transfer the kingdom of the Persians to the Greeks, which of course later happens under Alexander. This is before that. So it doesn't occur here. They're trying to take this kingdom by deception that they will later

2:45:10 take by force. They change the geopolitics of this in order to make it into their own sort of political diatribe against their enemies. And so they change him from a Macedonian to an Agagite. In order to tie him into these people that they have sort of mythologized and turned into their enemies for all time. Despite the fact that again Agag and his people are destroyed under King Saul, Samuel being the one who actually takes the sword and kills Agag because he was taken prisoner, instead of being devoted to destruction as Saul was commanded by God. They still view this as their battle to be waged. And in many of their writings, particularly Rabbinic writings, some things in the Talmud, they do not believe that their Messiah will appear, and

2:46:02 they will take possession of the world, because of course that's what they view as being the role of the Messiah in their religion. They don't believe that will happen until Christendom is destroyed, until Europe is destroyed, until basically all of the sons of Japheth are destroyed. is why they made this edit. That is what they are pushing here, because that is their worldview. That is their religion. And yet again we find that God has directly intervened to preserve the Persian kingdom and their rule. Artaxerxes rule was preserved first by Mardeus and then by Esther's actions. And Amon was executed, was crucified, as punishment for that plotting on behalf of Macedonia. I want to read just two more brief snippets from Artaxerxes letter.

2:46:54 Again, this letter went out to uh all one hundred and twenty seven provinces, every corner of Persia received their king, whom they viewed as a god, saying this. But we find that the Jews who have been consigned to destruction by the most abominable of men are not malefactors, but living according to the justest laws, and being sons of the living God, the most high and mighty, who maintains the kingdom to us as well as to our forefathers, in the most excellent order? And then he concludes near the end, for in the place of the destruction of the chosen race almighty God has granted them this time of gladness. This is a profoundly Christian confession. I don't know if our deserts is in heaven, I have no

2:47:43 idea, and I'm not making that claim. 'Cause undoubtedly there was other idolatry and wickedness going on, But in this moment, his confession, the the Jews are the sons of the living God and the most high and mighty, who maintains his kingdom and all of his forefathers, he's saying that there is a king of kings, and it is not Arta Xerxes. He's saying that he has a head in heaven, and he's confessing the true God who came to Martius in a vision, and who worked through Astra to preserve his kingdom. He's giving God the glory, our God. You can see why they had to delete this. Like I said at the beginning, and I've been saying for a while elsewhere, Esther's not remotely the same book. You cannot possibly read what's in the Septuagint and have any of

2:48:29 the same conclusions that you get from the version that you've read previously. I should add to my previous comments about Macedonian versus Agag and all of these various things, you've probably heard the Jews speak of Amalek. That is what they mean when these things are referenced, because Agag was of course a king of the Amalekites. So when they speak of Amalek, they're talking about Christendom. They're talking about you. They're talking about your people, they're talking about Europe. And they believe that they are supposed to have perpetual war with Amalek until they have destroyed every single person connected to him. Now of course they're entirely wrong about the genealogy because Amalek, of

2:49:14 course, is not a son of Japheth, but it doesn't matter because this is their religion, that's what they actually believe. The final section, then, the final subtraction, is section F. This is sort of the true conclusion to the Book of Esther. It is Mordecai explaining what happened and interpreting the dream that he had earlier in light of everything that followed from it, the dream, of course, being a prophetic vision. And so I will simply read the entirety of this particular subtraction. And Mordecai said, These things have come from God, for I remembered about the dream that I saw concerning these things, for no item of them failed. There was the small fountain that became a river, and there was

2:50:02 light, and the sun and much water. Esther is the river whom the king married, and he made her queen. In the two dragons are I myself in Haman, and the nations are those that have been gathered together to destroy the name of the Judeans. But my nation, this is Israel, the people who cried to God, and we were saved, and the Lord saved his people, and the Lord rescued us out of all these afflictions, and God performed signs and wonders, great things that have not been done among the nations. Therefore he made two lots, one for the people of God, and one for all the nations, and these two lots came for a season and a time, and for a day of judgment before God, and for all the nations, and God remembered his people, and justified

2:50:48 his own inheritance, and these days in the month of Adar, the fourteenth and the fifteenth of the same month, shall be for them days with a gathering and joy and merriment before God, throughout the generations, for eternity among his people Israel. In the fourth year, when Ptolemaus and Cleopatra were reigning, Dosithius, who said he was a priest and a Levite, and Ptolemy his son, brought into Egypt the preceding letter concerning Pyrim Theorem, which they had affirmed had been translated by Lysimachus, the son of Ptolemaeus, one of those in Jerusalem. So we also happened to get in this particular book a sort of colophon telling us the translation history of this, and how we came into possession of the book of Esther.

2:51:34 So just briefly, as I said earlier, we'll have a link. The there's a webpage that lays all this stuff out and you should just go read for yourself. Pick whatever Septuagint translation you want. I should actually warn you that this is one of the places where Bretton's falls down. It is not a faithful translation of the Septuagint. It just kind of mashes everything together. This is true, I think, more so in Job than in Aster, but you have to keep continuously checking it. Lexum may be better in some regard there, but as we said earlier, there's no full solution to I want to read this eptuagint in English because it doesn't exist yet. Every single option you can put forward has serious deficiencies.

2:52:15 It's worth trying. But just be aware that you're still going to have to muddle through and There are going to be things that you're going to have to get cleaned up later. I think it's important just to summarize what has happened in Esther. In the rabbinic text, the deliverance comes through the courage of Esther, the political maneuvering of Mordecai, there's a series of convenient coincidences. Basically the king's insomnia, Haman's ill timed arrival, etc., are the only reason that everything worked out. Whereas in the Septuagint, God's a primary actor. God sends Mardius a prophetic dream, God changes the king's heart, in subtraction D. Esther and Marticus attribute all the success to God through prayer, in

2:52:58 subtraction C. In the salvation of the Judeans is not a happy accident at all. It's a divine act. God acted through them to preserve both the Judeans, the Jewish bloodline, and it preserved Artaxerxes' kingdom. Artaxerxes remained king because God intervened. The Macedonians did not overthrow the Persians at this time, because God did not permit it. Later on he did permit it. Now Now, we don't know to what extent Arta Xerxes preserved his confession here. I don't think there's any archaeological record for it, so probably not a great personal track record for him. On the other hand, that would be the sort of thing that would get deleted. Yeah, there are often cases I'm not making the claim that this

2:53:43 happened here, but you will find cases where entire portions of a dynasty get deleted because they crossed Some future leader. So the absence of evidence isn't evidence either way. We don't know, and I certainly wouldn't either. But Arta Xerxes had a Christian confession at times. And I think that when you think back to that verse in First Thessalonians 2 that I quoted earlier, God desires all mankind to come to him, every nation, not individuals, nations, kings on down. There's no such thing as individuals. When a king is good, his people are good. When Job was king over Edom, Edom was a Christian land. They were a land of God fearers. Do you think that this king who is so blessed by God and who was held up as blameless?

2:54:34 Do you think that he had people committing idolatry the way the Jews are committing idolatry left and right? Absolutely not. God would not have called him blameless as a king because he would have been responsible. When you have a good ruler, you have good people. When you have a good husband, you have a good wife, you have good children. Now, it's imperfect when humans are doing this, but the influence of the man who's at the top shapes everything else. Every time Israel had a bad ruler, they fell away and God crushed them again. Repeatedly they were punished, thrown into chains as they have been again here in Esther, for punishment. Esther confessed that in her prayer, they deserved it 'cause they were

2:55:18 idolatrous. And Mardecaus cried out to God, remember your covenant with your people. Remember the promise you made to Abraham, because we're a part of it. For his sake, for your sake, keep your promise, and it's gonna save us and the process. The Christian conduct here is falls to almost everybody except for Amon himself. It's a remarkable difference in books. And so it's well worth reading. Like Hester's a great book. I really like it now. I never I did not like it at all. For the historical reasons I've been told because it just it did not have the voice of God in it. As we've said before, a lot of guys, random people, I don't know them, have said when I started reading the Septuagint, it had

2:56:05 the same voice as the New Testament, and that is absolutely true. God promises that his sheep will recognize his voice, and that's what we have here in the Septuagint. Certainly what we have here in Aster. And so this is the end of our Old Testament section of the ongoing Septuagint series. We will be doing two, we believe. There's always that possibility of a third, but we believe we can do it in two. We will be doing two episodes in the New Testament and then the final episode on where do we go from here? But by way of sort of a section conclusion, I want to go over a few miscellaneous things that I just happen to have noticed, as it were, in my own reading, and then sort of close out this section of the Septuagint series.

2:56:56 But in the book of First Samuel, and it happens to be the example because it is the book through which I am reading right now for the daily devotions, and I've been looking at the footnotes as I've gone along. And in chapter 20, which I read recently, one of the footnotes stood out to me, footnote six. These are going to all be footnotes from the ESV, and I'm making a point that Woe made earlier on, but I want you to pay close attention to some of these footnotes and something that you will hear consistently. And so footnote six, which is in chapter twenty, verse starting with forty, I'll read forty and forty one. And Jonathan gave his weapons to his boy and said to him, Go and carry them to the city.

2:57:41 And as soon as the boy had gone, David rose from beside the stone heap and fell on his face to the ground and bowed three times. When you read that verse, you think that you're reading the Rabbinic Text, because supposedly the ESV Old Testament is based on the Rabbinic Text. But if you look at Footnote 6, it says Septuagint, Hebrew, from beside the south. And so if we were to read this in the Hebrew instead of in the Greek, it would say, and as soon as the boy had gone, David rose from beside the south and fell on his face. This is one of those instances where they have used the Greek to correct the Hebrew, because the Hebrew is incoherent. Now I'm just going to read straight through just the footnotes, not

2:58:29 the accompanying verses Footnotes one through six in Samuel chapter twelve. one Septuagint. Hebrew lax testify against me. Number two. Septuagint. Hebrew lax is witness. Number three. Septuagint. Hebrew lacks and the Egyptians oppress them. four. Septuagent the army of Jabin, King of Hazor. five. Septuagent, Syriac. Hebrew has instead Badan. six. Septuagint. Hebrew has Fathers. In this one chapter, there are five instances. In the sixth one they decided not this is not the sixth, but in Footnote 4. They decided not to include what is in the Septuagint, but in each of the other cases, they included the language from the Septuagint in preference to the Hebrew. And so when Woe said earlier in the episode that when you

2:59:27 read the Old Testament, in many places you are in fact reading the Septuagint. That's very true. Because there are many places where the translators have decided to clarify, to add to, to correct the Hebrew Using the Greek. I will get back to that in a moment, but I want to go over a few footnotes from chapter thirteen, just to sort of drive home this point. In verse one, chapter thirteen, you have Saul lived for one year and then became king, and when he had reigned for two years over Israel, Saul chose three thousand men of Israel, and then it keeps going on, but there's a footnote there on Israel. That footnote one says Hebrew Saul was one year old when he became king, and he reigned two years over Israel.

3:00:17 They use the Septuagint because the Hebrew is simply wrong. Because Saul is, of course, not one year old at this point, and Saul did not become king when he was one year old. Because he was anointed. when he was already a full grown man. And so this is another case where the Greek has been used not simply to add to the Hebrew, but to correct an error in the Hebrew. And then we have later on in verse fifteen, and Samuel arose and went up from Gilgal. rest of the people went up after Saul to meet the army. They went up from Gilgal to Gibeah of Benjamin. Well the footnote says, Septuagint, Hebrew lacks, the rest of the people, from Gilgal. We're just missing a bunch of that verse in the Rabbinic text.

3:01:11 and they used the Greek to correct it. Footnote four. This one simply says Septuagint Hebrew ploughshare, because the Hebrew repeats a word from earlier in the verse, they use the Septuagint to correct that. And then the final example, Footnote seven. Footnote seven, which is to chapter twenty one, simply says The meaning of the Hebrew verse is uncertain. We don't know what it means. We just use the septuagent to try to fix it. Now, if you're dealing with a human contract, there is going to be an official version of that contract. The official version is the version that is theoretically read by all parties. It is then signed by the relevant parties, usually certified in some way, maybe stamped, maybe you have a notary there.

3:02:02 It is the official version of the document. It is, in fact, the only binding version of the document. Now you can make conformed or certified copies, which are simply copies, exact copies, in the case of certified, of the of the original, but the original is binding because it is the original. It is the agreement of the parties. We have something similar when it comes to literature, and I will get to scripture in a minute here, because scripture is a type of literature, but there's a key difference. If you have fragments of some historical piece of literature, and say you're missing part of it, you can go to foreign language translations of it in order to fix what is missing. Now is it going to be perfect?

3:02:48 Probably not. But is it going to be good enough for a secular work? The answer is of course it is. Because you are going to be able to restore what was lost, corrupted, bugs ate it, the ink smeared, whatever it happens to be, many things happened to documents down through the centuries. Is that acceptable when it comes to the Word of God? The answer is no, because God, of course, says, neither jot nor tittle. And for those who don't know, a jot and a tittle, look at the letter I, the line is a jot, the dot is a tittle. That's the English example. Neither jot nor tittle will pass away. The way that we have treated as the Christian Church, the Old Testament, God's Word, is utterly unacceptable.

3:03:39 We have made this hodgepodge by using the text that the rabbis gave us and then fixing it with the Greek as best we can in places where it's broken or incomprehensible or missing, whatever it happens to be. But to return to the example of the contract, you can't fix the lesser unless you have the greater. And you can't fix the greater with the lesser. So for instance, if you have a corrupted copy of something, you can't use that to fix that which is superior. What I'm saying more plainly is that we already admit the Greek is the Word of God. Because if you are using the Greek to correct the Hebrew, you are saying the Greek is correct. The Greek is the word of God, because otherwise you couldn't do

3:04:30 that. If the Hebrew were the word of God, you could not use the Greek to correct it. You would have to be content with whatever the Hebrew has. Well we haven't done that. We've already tacitly admitted that we believe the Greek is superior. What we're simply saying is we should go ahead and go forward with the Greek. There are other reasons for that, of course, and we'll make the full conclusion to the argument after the New Testament episodes at the end of the second one. But we can already see here very plainly, we should simply be using the Greek, and we're already doing it just in a hand Just in a haphazard fashion, instead of in a consistent fashion that honors God and properly pays attention to His word and gives it

3:05:13 its rightful place. Instead of simply turning to the Septuagint and using it to plug holes in the Hebrew, we should just use the Septuagint. It is the scripture of the ancient church. It is God's preserved word It is completely absurd that we have just accepted this state of affairs. We've just been fine with the way things have been done. Translation committees pick from here and there to plug holes and change things and interpret and deal with vague passages. We wouldn't even accept that with a translation of Shakespeare into French. And yet we accept it with the Word of God. It's completely and utterly ridiculous. It's worth repeating the quote from Eusebius that I quoted earlier. Therefore, we suspect that this was something which the Jews did.

3:06:02 Or we could turn to Justin Martyr, who says that the Jews expunged messianic passages from their text. We could heap up examples from the church fathers saying these things. We have known all along what the Jews did to the text of Scripture, and yet we accepted the rabbinic text from their hands. And it's worth highlighting what the Jews actually believe. We've done this in previous episodes, we've done it in episodes outside this series, but it is worth repeating because it is vitally important to understanding what has happened and why. The Jews do not believe in scripture. That is the fundamental point. That is why we brought up the saying, what Torah forbids, Talmud permits. But even the Talmud they reinterpret.

3:06:49 They don't even hold their own interpretation to be binding, and that is their own interpretation that reverses what scripture says. Because their real religion is their race. And when I say their real religion is their race, I mean that in part as a condemnation of those who would try to stand up neo-paganism as an alternative for Christians, as an alternative for the white Western world, for Europeans. Because that's a race religion. It's not quite the same of a race religion as what the Jews have built, but it's still turning into that. It's completely absurd. We don't want to be what they have become, what they have made themselves over many centuries of extreme wickedness. And so the question is

3:07:40 why? Why would the Jews make these edits? I went over one of the reasons earlier in the episode. In addressing the prophecies about the Christ, their own personal interpretation of them, they had for a long time held that the Christ would appear at the end of or during the sixth age, and for them an age was basically a thousand years. The problem, of course, is as I highlighted earlier with the genealogies, if you tabulate those genealogies, well oops, Christ was born in about the year 5500. Exactly when they thought he would be born. Now we could say maybe their interpretation of whatever they were reading was right, or maybe it's incidentally right, or my personal preference, I think God was playing a little joke on them.

3:08:32 But they couldn't have that. So they went back in and edited the genealogies, to remove somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred years, right around there. Because now, in their reckoning, Christ is born in the year four thousand. Well he can't possibly be the Messiah. He's not born in the sixth age. Well, think about that for a minute. According to the Jewish reckoning, in what age are we currently? We're in the sixth age. That is why they are getting so amped up about their plans to build the temple, about their Messiah appearing, which if anyone like that appears, it is most certainly the Antichrist. But they have changed it so that their interpretations will match the tabulation and their Messiah should appear pretty much any day now.

3:09:28 That's what they believe. That's why they made those changes. It's similar to that reinterpretation of Amalek as Europe and Christendom. Because if you read scripture and simply believe what Scripture says, Amalek doesn't descend from Japheth. Europeans descend from Japheth. We can't be Amalek because we're not related to him. They are more closely related to Amalek than we are. But of course, they've reinterpreted that, because it is only their interpretation of whatever document that serves their racial ends as the Jewish people that is their true religion. And so that's why they changed Haman from a Macedonian to an Agagite, to make him an Amalekite, to make the narrative in Esther match their revenge fantasy.

3:10:17 I said earlier that I would talk about three types of edits that the rabbis made to scripture. And so I want to go over those now. I think these are probably the three sorts of things you want to look for if you're reading through and trying to compare. Now I would say, and Woe would also say just read the Septuagint. You don't need to spend a bunch of time going back and forth and comparing one to the other. If you're so inclined though, here are the three types of changes you're going to see. And even if you're just familiar with scripture and you're reading the Septuagint, you will still notice these changes because you'll have that knowledge Of the rabbinic text, of course, modulo the changes they've made by

3:10:59 importing the Septuagint. But the three main kinds of changes they've made are a reduction in God's role, the concealing or removing of Christ, and the elevation of the Jews. You see all of this in Esther, incidentally, you certainly see that reduction in God's role in Esther, because God's just completely absent in the rabbi's version of Esther. He's certainly not in the Septuagint, he's from the beginning to the end, the alpha and the omega as it were. The elevation of the Jews, of course, is also there in Esther because they turned it into this revenge fantasy that is purely a racial matter, God's not really involved, it's just the Jews getting revenge on people who don't like them for no reason whatsoever.

3:11:45 Ironically again, removing the bad reason they weren't liked at this particular point in history, probably the only time. And then concealing or removing Christ. There are many prophecies, we went over those in an earlier episode, but there's one that's perhaps worth going into a little bit more. It's worth noting that a virgin birth isn't technically impossible. And so if all you have is that, that's not an impossibility because technically speaking, a human being being a mammal, mammals can do this, a woman can give birth to her own clone. The virgin birth is a miracle because Christ is male. And clone of a woman is in fact not a man, as you might have noticed. The fundamental baseline takeaway is that they truly are of their father

3:12:36 the devil. He's a liar and a murderer from the beginning, in the words of Christ. They have done everything they can to subvert the church all along. Because they hate Christ, they hate his sheep, they hate his church, and they want to do everything they can to destroy it. That's why they call us Amalek. That's why they've made these changes. That's why they're willing to go so far as to edit the Word of God. And Christians have known this for centuries. The early church used the Septuagint. That was their Bible. When you read, many of the church fathers, when they quote scripture, they quote the Septuagint, because the Septuagint is Scripture. That's what they were reading. They were reading it in Greek.

3:13:25 We have had the Septuagint all along because God did exactly what he promised. Because God has promised he would preserve his word. As we noted, the Hebrew was entirely lost. God destroyed it, it's more than lost. God destroyed Hebrew. And not just the Hebrew of Scripture, He destroyed the Hebrew language. He erased it from the earth. They resurrected something, they basically practice necromancy, the linguistic equivalent, revived this thing and called it Hebrew. But that's not scripture, because Scripture is what we've had all along, that God preserved for us as He promised He would, in the Greek, a language that has never been lost. Now some of us in the West certainly forgot how to read and write and understand Greek, but the Greek language was never

3:14:19 lost. We have always had Greek speakers, we have always had the resources to learn and use the Greek. We basically just sort of lost them in a wall, like the Israelites did with scripture at one point. In fact, one of the words in Esther, a word that basically translates to braggart, traces all the way back to Homeric Greek, is a fundamentally different thing from the degenerate Hebrew language that never rose to the level of a true and full language, and then God killed it and erased it. So the fact that we ever accepted anything from the hands of the rabbis is completely and utterly ridiculous. All we had to do was be faithful to what God gave to his church, what God preserved for his church, what the early

3:15:08 church used as its foundation. If we had simply stuck with that, we would have avoided so very many problems down through the centuries. Now thankfully it has still been preserved, and so all we have to do is the relatively minor work of translating from one European language to another. Very easy to do. There's some differences, of course, even translating from German to French or French to English. Closely related languages, there's still some differences, some difficulties. But it's nothing like translating from Hebrew to a proper language. It's still the same language family. It is not that hard for us to translate Greek into English, or for those men who are so inclined to learn Greek and

3:15:52 read it in the Greek. It's not that hard to do. And God preserved it for us, and actually He also preserved us against ourselves and our own stupidity, which is something that God does constantly. God has a sort of special care for fools, as has been said many times in many ways down the millennia. Thankfully, in this case, we are the recipients of that blessing. Whether or not we bear the bulk of the blame or we can assign it to our ancestors hardly matters, because of course children do suffer for the sins of their fathers. In this case, though, we have the great fortune that we have not actually lost Actually, lost anything except time. Because yes, we have centuries of scholarship unfortunately devoted to the rabbinic

3:16:39 text. That is time that was largely wasted. If it had been devoted, to the Septuagint, to the study of God's actual word, we can only imagine the sort of riches we would have on hand today. But at the same time we have to look at this as an opportunity. Because we have the Word of God, we know how to read the Word of God, it's very easy for us to translate the Word of God, and now we get to do centuries of scholarship on the Word of God in an actually functional language. We don't have to make excuse for things that are missing or for things that are incomprehensible. We're not going to have eight thousand footnotes in the text when we're done saying the wording of this is uncertain, the Hebrew is

3:17:23 unclear. The Hebrew is uncertain. We're not going to have that. Because that is not the case with Greek. Because men can learn and read Greek. It's still a living language. If you learn it, granted, learn modern pronunciation, not Erasmian, but if you learn Greek, you could travel and speak to native speakers, because it's a living language. The same is not true of Hebrew, and there are those who say, what about modern Hebrew? It's a fundamentally different language. It is not the same thing. We went over that in a previous episode. And so we do not want you to look at this as some sort of horrible disaster, some sort of incurable wrong. We don't want you to look at all the Bibles in your house and think I have to burn these things.

3:18:10 Instead we want you to look at this as being proof of God's care for his church, of being proof that God does follow through with his promises, that not a single word of his ever falls to the ground. He said he would preserve his word and he did despite All of the attacks of the Jews, all of the attacks of Satan, and all of the stupidity of Christians down through the centuries. Despite all of that, despite the odds, we still have the Word of God. We still have it in its entirety, in an accessible form. All we have to do is read it, translate it, use it, and stop relying on the wickedness that is the rabbinic text, this thing that was handed to us by the Christ killers, with the very obviously explicit goal of subverting the church and destroying the faith.

3:19:08 It doesn't mean that you can't read your current existing Bible profitably. God still preserved a great deal of his word in these texts, in these versions edited by the rabbis. But it's sorta similar to what we as Lutherans would say about the sacraments and things like that. There's the fullness of the feast to be had. All you have to do is accept it. You don't have to settle for stale bread and tepid water. God has set out the banquet. You should come to the banqueting hall. In this case, it is the Septuagint, it is the Greek, it is the Word of God, contrary to and over against the thing handed to us by the rabbis. The Christian Church was founded upon the Word of God. The Christian Church will always have the Word of God because God

3:20:03 has promised to preserve it. All we have to do is start using it, instead of leaving it in a wall, or in our case, somewhere in the dusty archives of the Vatican or whatever museum. We have the Septuagint. It is the Word of God. It's the one used by Christ and the Apostles, it's the one used by the Church Fathers, it is the one used by the early Church, it is the one we should be using, because it is the Word of God.