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The New Testament in Color (Part 1) with Esau McCaulley

David Capes  

Joining me today is Esau McCauley, Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at  Wheaton College. He worked with NT Wright, our friend from the University of St Andrews.

David Capes  

Welcome. We’re so glad that you’re here. 

Esau McCaulley  

Oh, thank you. Happy to be here. I’m enjoying it, it’s a beautiful, beautiful space. 

David Capes  

Yes and you’ve had a chance to enjoy our Yarnton property.

Esau McCaulley  

Yes! How many people have done both? I’ve done double duty. 

David Capes  

You are twice blessed. 

Esau McCaulley  

I have to go back once the library is finished there, so I can see it fully operational.

David Capes  

We’re going to be talking about your commentary that you led. It’s a great project, and it’s called the New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary. Tell us about this project.

Esau McCaulley  

My first book looked at the contributions of the African American church to understanding Christianity in America, and the distinctive ways in which African Americans have read the Bible and made sense of it. And so, when I wrote that book, it was supposed to be a part one of a two part series. But a lot of people bought the first book. And then wanted to talk about it, some people attacked it, so you’ve got to defend it. So it took longer to help people understand what I did and didn’t mean by African American biblical interpretation. Maybe we’ll talk about that for a second to help everyone understand New Testament in Color.

David Capes  

That was one of my questions down the way. Let’s talk a little bit about that, because you wrote a chapter on that here.

Esau McCaulley  

Yes, when we think about African American biblical interpretation, we could get this idea that skin color creates interpretations of the Bible. Like there’s something in the melanin that makes you a magical Bible interpreter. That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is the color of your skin impacts the way that you’re treated, and when you’re treated a certain way, it raises certain kinds of questions that you then go to the Bible and answer. A good example is a lot of African Americans are told that Christianity is a white man’s religion. So, we have to show from the Bible that Christianity isn’t a white man’s religion. And I doubt that most pastors in white churches have had people come and say, Christianity is the black man’s religion, prove to me that it isn’t. So the questions that are raised in an African American context aren’t the same questions that are raised in other contexts. 

The other example that I use, is say it’s 1954 and Brown v. Board of Education has just passed. Now African Americans are thinking through the questions of how we’re going to be Christians in this new context. Now consider, it’s also 1954 but it’s a white pro-segregation congregation, and the pastor has  to stand up and make the case from the Bible. Different context produces different questions. Now you still turn into the Bible for answers. The Bible is still the authority, but the kinds of questions that you ask are influenced by your context. Then sometimes because of your context, you ask questions that lead to insights that people might not otherwise notice.

Another example that I give is say you’re getting ready to teach a youth group, and you’re looking through the Bible. You’re thinking, what’s a good message to say to 15-year-olds. And because 15-year-olds are in your head, you see exactly how this part in Paul, will speak exactly to the experiences of a 15 or 16 year olds. Those insights are there, but you didn’t notice them, because normally you think about preaching to adults. In actuality, the people who you imagine when you read the Bible influence the kinds of things that you notice, and it influences the kinds of things that you bring out of the text. So if we only have one group of people in mind when we interpret the Bible, it leads to the possibility that we don’t see things that are there. I’m not talking about distorted meanings. I’m talking about motivated readings, the things that you notice because you’re attending to them based upon your experiences. 

Maybe another example of this, not to belabor the point. Let’s say you’re a woman, and you’re told that women are intellectually inferior. You ask the question what does the Bible actually say about women. And as a woman, you might be really motivated to get this right, because this matters for who you are. Motivated readings aren’t necessarily bad, sometimes they can help us or sometimes they can hinder us. Motivated readings are a fact of reality, and African Americans in the United States have had unique experiences that have required us to answer questions that other communities haven’t. And there’s a deposit of reflections that have arisen from a community that we call the black church, that have formed habits of reading. And so that’s what we call African American biblical interpretation. Not skin color producing readings, but skin color producing experiences that we then bring to the text that influence our reading. 

If that is true of African Americans, it’s also true of people from other cultures. We thought what happens if you bring different cultures together to create a commentary that itself reflects what the church is supposed to be, people from every tribe, tongue and nation, reading the Bible together to make sense of it. The New Testament in Color is black, white, Asian and Latino scholars who are together working on a commentary on the New Testament. Not that we all did each one individually, but each person wrote a commentary on a particular book. We have Native American peoples, First Nations indigenous peoples, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and white scholars. We wanted to focus on North American minorities. We saw things like the Asian Bible Commentary and others that were more Bible commentaries looking at evangelicalism, listening to the voice of the global church. And we said, it’s great to listen to the global church through the African Bible Commentary, the Asian Bible Commentary. These things are important, but what about the ethnic minorities in our midst? What we wanted to do was to create something that brought together the ethnic minorities in the United States along with the majority culture, because white is a culture, and bring them together to create a commentary.

David Capes  

There are white scholars here, as well as black scholars. Gene Green, Michael Gorman, Amy peeler is one of the editors. Janette Oak. Tell us about Janet.

Esau McCaulley  

Dr. Oak is an Asian American scholar at Fuller Seminary. She focuses on I & II Peter. She’s also working on a commentary right now on all three letters of John. She is an accomplished scholar, Associate Professor at Fuller. She’s published tons of stuff. Amy peeler is a colleague at Wheaton. We love Wheaton. Amy is a Hebrews scholar, and she also deals a lot with gender, and is helping us understand how the Bible describes women and the gifts that God has given to women and how the church needs to embrace the entire body of Christ to effective ministry. She’s a great New Testament scholar. She did a commentary on Hebrews. Her commentary on Hebrews just came out sometime recently. There’s Osvaldo Padilla. He’s a Latino scholar at Beeson Divinity School, which is in Alabama, you know, God’s country! He is working on the commentary on the Pastorals. 

All of them are accomplished scholars. We wanted three things from the people who participated. One, we wanted them to affirm that Scripture is the final authority for Christians, for faith and practice. Although we agree to disagree on a lot of stuff, we wanted to say we agree on the Bible. The second thing we said was we wanted the creeds to function as the consensus around Christian belief as well. So the Nicene Creed, the Apostles Creed. We said, there’s a bunch of denominations here and we think the creeds are a good summary of what it means to be a Christian. So If you say you’re pro-creed, and you say you like the Bible, you could be in the commentary. Beyond that, we gave people freedom. We also said we didn’t want people to speak for their entire ethnicity. I’m not speaking for black people, but I’m a black person speaking from that perspective. This is not the black view on A, B and C. It’s more of a person who’s being unapologetically themselves in the interpretive process.

David Capes  

Let’s talk a little bit about your own journey growing up in Alabama. Your own experiences. You were born in the 70’s I I take it. 

Esau McCaulley  

I like to call myself a child of the 70s. I was born in October of 1979. I’ve lived in the 70s, the 80s, the 90’s to 2000’s, the 2010’s and the 2020’s.

David Capes  

Six decades. Wow. It’s you were barely in the. 70s.

Esau McCaulley  

That month and a half in the 70s is a wild time.

David Capes  

Talk about your journey toward faith. 

Esau McCaulley  

I think that a lot of the times I talk more about decisions for Jesus rather than a decision for Jesus. I feel like a significant part of my spiritual journey is, over time, giving over more and more of my life to God. Because I was raised in a Christian home. My grandparents, on both sides of my family, were Baptist ministers. My mom was a minister. She became a minister after I did so I always say she followed me into ministry. She got ordained, a couple of years ago. We were in church every Sunday. We were kind of from a rough part of town, and so we tended towards binaries. You were either in the church or in the streets. And so I was in the church, but the levels of my piety waxed and waned over the years. And so I didn’t say it out loud to the pastor, but I’ll come to church on Sunday and if you preach a good sermon, I’m going to be a Christian that week. If you don’t, you lost me. I’ve always kept that with me, because I know what it’s like to go into church and say, if I don’t hear a word from God today I don’t know what’s going happen. 

That was most of my childhood, and I would say that for me, Christianity was in periods in my life, more of a survival mechanism. It was the way out of my neighborhood. And maybe I can say, to make a very long story short, I was a college football player, division three at the University of the South. And it was shocking to go from the poverty of my high school to college at the University of the South, where there’s so much money and so much wealth. They joked because in football we had “two a days”, where you practice twice a day. Tennessee was super hot, and I was the only person who actually ever gained weight during “two a days”. Because I never had that much food in my life. You could just go to cafeteria and eat whenever you want. I couldn’t believe it. 

But one of the things that I realized is that after I was no longer in this place where I didn’t recognize my need for God, I said, Oh, God had done what he needed to do. He got me to college, and I was in college. It was a more theologically progressive place, where I took the religion classes. They told you that none of this stuff was true, and all of the kind of stuff you hear as a stereotype of religion and higher education. It’s really good to tell a college student that God doesn’t care what you do. It wasn’t that intellectually stimulating. There were the fraternity houses down the road and the professors telling me I can do what I want. That’s a toxic mix for a college student. And I kind of drifted away from my faith for a little bit in college. Then there came this particular moment in college. 

It was Christmas break when I had a significant spiritual moment in my life. I’m home for break, and I’m back in my room, but it’s no longer mine, because when you leave our house, there’s too many people to leave an empty room. So it was my sister’s bedroom and everything’s pink now. I was listening to Etta James, like old school and Billie Holiday; this sad jazz music on this thing called Napster. If you’re a certain age, you remember when you could download illegal music before there were streaming services. I wasn’t praying or anything. I’m just listening to sad jazz music. Because I had everything that I wanted in college. I was no longer worried about what I was going to eat. I was doing well in school. I was doing well in sports. I was not praying. I was just listening to depressing jazz music because it felt like it matched my mood. 

I had this idea that I think comes from God. It was like a sentence, fully formed. What happens when you receive everything you ever wanted, but it’s not sufficient to bring you joy. And I said that has summarized my college experience. And then the answer to the question that the Spirit was, maybe you should try God and take him seriously. And so that was the spiritual transformation. But because I had been in college and I had all of the intellectual stuff taken away from me, I had to go through this process of reading myself. I had to say, I know I’ve had this experience of God, but now I had to make intellectual sense of this and that. And actually, the study to make sense of what I’d experienced spiritually led me down the road to becoming, ultimately, an academic. I began to answer those questions that I received in those courses. 

Jeannine asked me, what is it that I like doing the most? And I said, talking to students about the Bible and giving them the confidence to live their lives on the basis of each text. Because I know what it’s like to have a professor whose goal was to take that away from students. I want to give that back to students, to say we are not fools for trusting in the God who revealed these texts. And so that’s a little bit of my spiritual journey.

David Capes  

Great story. 

This is the end of part one of my interview with Esau McCaulley.  Part two is coming up next week.

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The Letter to the Hebrews with Amy Peeler

To hear the podcast (20 min.) click here.

Amy Peeler has been with us before on The Stone Chapel Podcasts.  Her first podcast has two parts and she talked about her book Women and the Gender of God.

There is a link in the show notes below to find those two podcasts.  She joins David Capes today on the podcast to discuss her new commentary on the letter to the Hebrews.

Who Is Amy Peeler?

Amy Peeler is the Kenneth T. Wessner Chair of Biblical Studies at Wheaton College. The former holder of that chair was Dr. Doug Moo. 

She earned her PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary and today is ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church.  She serves as associate rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal church in Geneva, IL.

The Letter to the Hebrews

For all practical purposes the letter to the Hebrews is one of the most complicated and robust of biblical books. 

It has attracted Dr. Peeler’s attention since grad school.  She loves it, first, because of its heavy engagement with the Scriptures of Israel.  She also loves it as a historian because of the way you can see Greek influences in the book.

We call it a letter today.  It also has the overtones of a sermon and deep encouragement to a community under stress.

The commentary is part of a new series on Spiritual Formation.  For Dr. Peeler the essential questions are: (1) who is God as revealed in Hebrews? (2) how are we to live in the light of this revelation? (3) how does reading this book change your life? 

Joshua Jipp, professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago, said on social media that this is his all time favorite commentary.  High praise, indeed! 

So if you want to know more about the letter to the Hebrews, listen to this podcast first.  Then find Dr. Peeler’s book.

Resources

For a link to Part 1 of her earlier podcast click here.

Part 2 can be found by clicking here.

For a link to her book, Hebrews in the Series Commentary for Christian Formation (Eerdmans 2024), click here.

For a link to her book, Women and the Gender of God (Eerdmans 2022), click here.  

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics? Just click here.

You can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library by clicking here

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The Gender of God, Part 1, with Amy Peeler

To hear the podcast (18 min) click here. 

There is a lot of talk about gender today.  Some people introduce themselves along with their pronouns (in my case: he, him).  The pronouns give you a sense of how people understand their genders.  According to some websites, there are over fifty genders.

Well, what does this focus on gender have to do with God?  Does God have a gender too? 

In the Bible, the pronouns of God are rendered masculine because it does reflect the original languages of the Scriptures: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.  But does God really have a gender?

In this podcast we explore the concept of “The Gender of God.”  This is part one of the podcast.  Our special guest is Dr. Amy Peeler. 

Who Is Amy Peeler?

Amy Peeler is an Associate Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College.  She has been in that position twelve years.  Dr. Peeler is well known as a wonderful researcher and writer. 

Amy has spent a good deal of time writing about the book of Hebrews.  She is also a minister at an Episcopal Church near Wheaton, IL.  

Recently she wrote a book entitled Women and the Gender of God.  It has attracted a lot of attention.  She hopes to help women find a more meaningful place in the Church today.

The Gender of God

The audio for this podcast is taken from a radio show co-hosted by David Capes called A Show of Faith on AM 1070 The Answer Houston. 

On this show are David and two co-hosts Father Mario Arroyo, Catholic priest, at St. Cyril of Alexandria Catholic Church in Houston, and Rudy Kong, a millennial theology student who works in the space industry. 

This episode is focused on the book written by Dr. Peeler which deals with the question of gender as it relates to God. 

She dives deeply into the Christian tradition, across the ages, in order to construct a productive way toward thinking about God. 

Is God male or is God genderless?  Might God be beyond gender?  Is God the fullness of  both genders? 

In this podcast Father Mario mentions another book by Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender  Published by Ignatius Press, 2022.  It is written from the Catholic perspective.  Both books seem like marvelous studies of the topic. 

Stay tuned for Part Two next week!

More Resources

The weekly radio show A Show of Faith”has its own podcast on Spotify.  Click here to access it.  It presents the whole hour radio show, unedited, with commercials and “bump” music.

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics? Just click here.

You can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library by clicking here.

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The Divine Warrior Myth and Andy Angel

Andy Angel came to the Lanier Theological Library in Houston and discussed with David Capes some ideas he had about “The Divine Warrior” in Scripture. 

Who is Andy Angel? 

Andy is the Director of Formation for Ministry in the Diocese of Oxford in the UK. 

He arranges and plans for the theological education of the clergy and the lay people in the Anglican Church. 

Andy is an Englishman and an Anglican clergy.  For a time he served as a pastor-teacher in Lima, Peru. He is a husband and father.  And he’s is also an author. 

“The Divine Warrior” What does that mean?

There are passages in the Bible that describe God as a warrior for his people.  When they are defeated, when they are down for the count, God arrives to fight for them. 

And God’s coming is described in amazing pictures and images, such as God coming on the clouds, the falling of the stars from heaven, the mountains melting beneath his feet, the valleys quaking at his presence. 

This is more than metaphor;  it is figurative language, because the truth of it cannot be captured in words. As an example, he talks at length about Psalm 18. 

Jesus as the Divine Warrior

Also in this podcast he turns his attention to an upcoming book about the Divine Warrior occurrences in the book Mark. 

He is exploring how and to what extent Jesus’s conflicts with the demonic forces, diseases, and human power structures picture Jesus as the Divine Warrior. 

If this is what Mark had in mind as he wrote his Gospel, he is operating with a very high Christology.

Andy’s Books

Here are more of Andy’s books:

Intimate Jesus: The Sexuality of God Incarnate

The Jesus You Really Didn’t Know

Playing with Dragons: Living with Suffering and God

For a transcript of this podcast, click here.

More resources

Want more Stone Chapel Podcasts on some great topics. Just click here.

What’s more, you can get information on upcoming lectures at Lanier Theological Library. Just click here.

To hear the podcast (about 20 min.) click here.

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The Mt. Ebal Curse Tablet with Scott Stripling

Recently, I sat down with Scott Stripling to talk about the publication of his team’s work on the discovery of the Curse Table from Mt. Ebal. It was an episode of “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” eHere’s a transcript of my conversation.

Scott Stripling  

Hi, I’m Scott Stripling, Provost at the Bible Seminary and VP of Donor Relations

David Capes

Dr. Scott Stripling, Scott. Good to see you. Welcome back to the Lanier Theological Library.

Scott Stripling  

Oh, David, it’s always a joy to come see you here, my friend. It’s a beautiful place and I think I might just move in.

David Capes  

For those who don’t know Scott Stripling, tell us about yourslef. Who is Scott Stripling?

Scott Stripling  

Well, I’m 60 years old. I’ve been married for 40 years. I have a PhD in ancient near eastern archaeology and a couple of master’s degrees. I’m a sports fanatic. I love my family and love the Lord. I’m addicted to reading the Bible and all the material culture and references that illuminate that background for us.

David Capes  

Well, you’ve been digging up a number of really interesting places in Israel over the last few years. I’d love to at some point, to talk about that. But today, we’re going to talk specifically about an announcement that you made last year at a press conference here at the Lanier Theological Library, about a find that has gotten a lot of attention. What did you announce last year?

Scott Stripling  

Yeah, it was March of last year [2022]. So just a little over 12 months ago we had a press conference here. Believe it or not, over 25 million people watched that press conference. There was a lot of interest and the reason is because it was a small folded lead tablet from Mt. Ebal. And it had what we believe is the oldest Hebrew script in a proto-alphabetic script. So the oldest Hebrew writing ever found in Israel and it included the name of Israel’s God.

David Capes  

Where was it found? 

Scott Stripling  

Okay, let me give you some landmarks. Abram cut covenant with God at Elon Moreh, Moses told the Israelites when you come back into the land and you gain a foothold, you’re going to go to Mt. Gerizim, which is right next to Elon Moreh, and you’re going to renew covenant with me there, pronouncing blessings from Gerizim and curses from Ebal. Joshua built an altar on Mt. Ebal to the Lord: Joshua 8:30. Adam Zertal excavated that altar in the 1980s. We went back and sifted through [the rubble] using a new technology of wet sifting. And that’s where we found this jewel.

David Capes  

So a dig was conducted in the 1980s. There was some refuse from that, because they were digging down and they just didn’t see this [artifact], right? They missed it. 

Scott Stripling  

No, in fact, archaeologists throw away about 75% of the evidence from the small finds. And that was the goal of my project to write a methodological paper and say, we can’t keep doing it the way we’ve been doing it. Because here’s what we’re missing. I had no idea that we were going to find this tablet of great significance.

David Capes  

It seems like everybody wants to find something big and monumental. But in fact, a lot of things over time that were larger, become a bit smaller, with the wear and tear of nature and erosion. But this lead tablet is a fascinating discovery. It was folded, right? 

Scott Stripling  

Yeah, it’s about the size of a business card folded in half, if you can picture that. Made out of lead, which kind of reminds us of Job 19:24. “Oh, that my words were written on lead tablets with an iron pen.” Okay, so it’s a very ancient way of thinking. They’re just gonna write down these words and seal them up.

David Capes  

And once the words were written down and sealed up, what kind of things are on the inside? What does it say? I know you [and your team] have been working on deciphering that. You’re trying to figure that out because you can’t open it up [the folded tablet].

Scott Stripling  

No, we tried and it’s impossible. The lead is now brittle. We had to go to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and use tomographic scanning in a lab there. And using those scans, we were able to recover text on the inside, which then was reinforced by bulges on the outside. So in other words, what we were seeing with the naked eye on the inside of the tablet was confirmed by bulges on the outside of the tablet as well. The first word we got was the word “arrur”, which is the Hebrew word for curse. And at that point, I thought you’ve got to be kidding me. 

David Capes  

So you’re on the mount of cursing. And this [account] goes back to the book of Deuteronomy chapter 26:27. And certain curses are to be pronounced and certain blessings are to be pronounced in this covenant renewal. And this is a particularly important moment in the history of the people.

Scott Stripling  

Well, that’s right. And they build an altar, Joshua 8:30. He says he built an altar to the Lord on Mount Ebal, which is not what we would expect. We would expect the altar to be on Mount Gerizim, the place of the blessing, but it’s on the place of the curse. And I think that’s so beautiful that it’s through the expiation, through the shedding of blood that there’s forgiveness of sin, Leviticus 17:11. And that’s where this tablet came from, was from the altar. So the picture is, here’s these curses first, by God, Yahweh, not by Satan, right? Yeah, you could deal with that. Now this is by Yahweh Himself. You’re cursed, and you will surely die. Now that curse is placed on the altar, and then the shedding of innocent blood covers it. And so the man who will come to the altar then is not held accountable for those curses. It’s the one who won’t own up to his action. So the symbolism is really beautiful.

David Capes  

Interesting. So is there any way to date this? Is there any way to say with any kind of certainty that this is from the 14th century BC or 8th century AD? 

Scott Stripling  

Well, fortunately, our academic peer reviewed article has just been released by Heritage Science. And so if you’re having trouble sleeping at night, just download that and you can read all about it. Yes, there are three ways that we can date this. Number one is from the archaeological context. There were only two strata at Mount Ebal that Adam Zertal excavated, late Bronze Age II and Iron Age I. So there’s only two choices. So either way, it’s older than any previous inscription that had been found in Israel. 

Any Hebrew inscription. Because we’ve got older Canaanite inscriptions. If it’s Late Bronze Age, which is what we argue in the article, then it’s several hundred years older. If it’s Iron Age, it’s still older. The existing ones say the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracan.  

David Capes  

So for people who don’t know the Bronze Age from the Iron Age. The Bronze Age was first. And then the Iron Age comes later.

David Capes  

Yes, with the transition around the year 1200 from one to the other.

David Capes  

Okay. So you’re arguing [the tablet] is [from] Bronze Age? So 1200, or before.

Scott Stripling  

Yes, 1400 to 1200. It’s in that range. Peter VanderVeen and I believe that it was closer to 1400, Gershon Galil, one of our co authors, feels like it’s closer to 1200. So what we’re saying is, LBII, Late Bronze Age II. And then there’s reasons why one might think it’s slightly older or not. But it’s not only that, we also have the source of the lead, because we were able to chemically test the lead at Hebrew University. And the lead derives from a mine in Greece at a place called Laurion.

David Capes  

Well, that implies imports.

Scott Stripling  

Yes and here’s the thing. We don’t all agree on very much in archaeology, but we all agree that around 1200, the imports stopped. Okay. So what does that tell us? If the lead came from a mine that we know was in use in Greece in the Late Bronze Age and imports to Israel stopped around 1200, ergo, it had to be earlier than 1200. So that’s the second way we have a date. And then thirdly, it’s the epigraphy. The style of writing is unique, and it’s a well known style of writing. It’s just been called proto-Canaanite normally, or proto-Sinaitic. Because they’re using the same alphabet, and Canaanites and Israelites have the same alphabet.

David Capes

It’s like Spanish and English. We use the same basic alphabet. 

Scott Stripling  

Yeah or maybe here’s another analogy. Let’s say I have a Muslim neighbor, and I’m a Christian. We’re still writing in English, right? You can’t tell one religion from another unless we have unique words. So if there was a prayer to Allah or something like that, within the script, then you might know my neighbor was a Muslim. And that’s what we have here. We have the name of God, Yahweh, or YHWH, the three letter spelling, twice. And there’s only one group of people in the ancient world worshipping this God, and those are the Israelites. So three ways: the epigraphy, archaeological context and the source of the lead.

David Capes  

This may well be the earliest evidence for the name of God.

Scott Stripling  

That’s right, in Israel. Now we have an older reference outside of, no I”m sorry, it’s not older. But we have a contemporary reference in Egypt of the Solep hieroglyph in the temple of Amenhotep III. He writes of the land of the nomads of Yahoo, or of Yahweh. So apparently there are nomads who worship Yahweh who have their own land by the year 1360.

David Capes 

And of course, Abraham is a nomad. “A wandering Aramean was my father” as the text says. Well, this is probably changed your life in the last twelve months.

Scott Stripling

Yeah, thanks a lot. I have lost a lot of sleep over this.

David Capes  

So 25 million times it’s been seen.

Scott Stripling  

At least. Maybe as many as 50 million because once things go into secondary media and it gets on Tiktok, I don’t even know how to count things on Tik Tok, but it’s like millions there. And plus the original press conference that we were counting. So we estimate at least 25 million views.

David Capes  

That’s incredible. Well, first of all, congratulations. Second is how do you follow it up? 

Scott Stripling  

Well, you know, now the academic debate begins, okay. And people can look at our research and agree or disagree, give alternate readings. But at least they’ve got good clean research in front of them that they can use as a basis for that. We now want to investigate the outside because we have writing on the outside as well. And so there will be a second academic article. And spoiler alert, it says pretty much on the outside what it says on the inside, but we do need to publish that also. 

David Capes  

Okay. So when you say it’s the same, is it a brief version of the same? Or is it the same length? Is it the same words?

Scott Stripling  

That’s a nice try David, to get that informtion out of me but it’s not gonna work! 

David Capes  

No, okay.

Scott Stripling  

But I will tell you this. On the inside, not only do you have Yahweh Yahu, but you also have El side by side. So the two names for the Hebrew God are side by side, which is very problematic for those who are advocating the Documentary Hypothesis. Because supposedly, those two are hundreds of years apart, right. And we have them side by side. So there’s going to be some theological argumentation, archaeological argumentation on a different levels at which we have to think about this. 

David Capes  

Where do you think the biggest pushback is going to be in relationship to this find and this interpretation?

Scott Stripling  

I think from two areas. Number one is the one I just mentioned. So seminaries that have been teaching the Documentary Hypothesis as a basis for understanding, kind of a paradigm through which people understand the ancient world. This is problematic, and so not everybody’s gonna be quick to say, oh, golly, we were wrong all these years. 

David Capes  

Nobody wants to admit that after teaching, and writing books on it for 40 years. Nobody wants to do that.

Scott Stripling  

And I can understand that. So I think we will get some pushback there. And then from the epigraphic community. It’s a very narrow, you know, people who have this unique skill set of being able to translate these ancient inscriptions. There’s always a variety, take the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracan, when it came out. I mean, there’s 100 different research angles, well, maybe it doesn’t say this, or it could say that. So we expect that type of thing as well.

Scott Stripling  

No that’s the thing, you’d have to say that it was a forgery. Either we did it or somebody else, you know, left this, this tablet there and it was a forgery or something like that. I laughed when someone suggested that like I’m smart enough to write in proto alphabetic script on lead from Laurion Greece on the planet.

David Capes

So is anybody quibbling over the date of the find at this point, anybody saying no, it really is later.

Scott Striping

No that’s the thing, you’d have to say that it was a forgery. Either we did it or somebody else, you know, left this tablet there and it was a forgery or something like that. I laughed when someone suggested that like I’m smart enough to write in proto-alphabetic script on lead from Laurion Greece on the planet.

David Capes  

A lead that is so brittle that you can’t write on it!

Scott Stripling  

I know! So where there’s two archeologist there are three opinions. And so there will be plenty of opinions. But we just felt like we wanted to be intellectually honest, do our very best research, presented in a highly reputable journal, so that everybody would have it as a historical record.

David Capes  

So has anybody pointed out the fact, that this was not found in situ, this was found in a heap of rubble that was moved off to the side and not seen? That seems like to me to be something somebody would say. Well, we don’t know exactly what level it was.

Scott Stripling  

Yeah, and that’s, a good point, I used to work on the Temple Mount. And for two years, I was a supervisor on the Temple Mount Sifting Project. And so we have multiple time periods from the earliest Paleolithic periods, all the way down to the Mamluk  and even later Islamic periods. Well, that’s problematic. If you’re wet sifting that material. At Ebal, we only have two choices, Late Bronze Age II, or Iron Age I, even though it was found out of context.

David Capes  

You’re already narrow. You’re already a bit narrow compared to what you just described, which could be 1000 years, right?

Scott Stripling  

Right. If that were the case, then that criticism would have more validity. But even if it were Iron Age I, and the script no longer continues into Iron Age I, it would be like saying that Chaucer’s English is still being used in our time or something like that. So, you know, there’s already been a change of script. But even if that were the case, it’s still older than the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracan by at least a couple of 100 years.

David Capes  

Let’s talk about context. Why did people write these curses on lead texts like this, and then fold them up? What were they trying to do with?

Scott Stripling  

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it was a titular document, summarizing the curses of Deuteronomy 28 and 29. And there it’s really self inpregnatory. “Cursed are you by the God Yahweh.” In other words, that’s exactly what Deuteronomy 28 says. If you don’t keep my covenant, all these curses will come upon you. So I think it’s a self imprenatory type of a curse.

David Capes  

So a person has, in a sense owned up to that. To being cursed?

Scott Stripling  

Binding himself, saying these are the consequences. I accept those consequences if I don’t keep the terms of the covenant. Which you find the exact same thing in the Abrahamic covenant. So blessings and curses. That’s how Late Bronze Age covenants were cut. There were always blessings and curses. We know of hundreds of these tablets.  They’re called defixios, that is the technical term. But I had never seen them from that earlier time period. I only knew them from later periods. So it’s not like we hadn’t seen it. As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was.

David Capes  

So you knew as a lead tablet and it was some sort of curse tablet.

Scott Stripling  

I knew it was a curse tablet. And I thought, oh, my goodness, it’s a curse tablet from the mountain of the curses. But I’m not aware of them from earlier time periods. So I was as surprised as anyone when the text that we recovered on the inside was a proto-alphabetic script.

David Capes  

Have other curse tablets been discovered from that period?

Scott Stripling  

No. In Israel, no. But in Egypt, yes. But not of the exact style with the folded lead tablet that you have the Execration texts from Egypt. We’ve got curses written on clay tablets. But you have to understand David, Adam’s team missed this. And they were good when they dry sift through everything. And they missed it. My team is also very good. We dry sifted everything again and we missed it. It was only with the new technology of wet sifting, that we were able to then see it and it popped. So, I think there may be a lot of them in dump piles sitting around Isreal.

David Capes  

So you just have to go back and wet sift all those piles.

Scott Stripling  

And that’s my contention to my colleagues. Let’s wet sift before we dump it into the piles, okay, so that we know the context that it’s coming from. Again, that was my motivation for the project. I wouldn’t try to start any controversy other than to say methodologically we can’t keep doing it the way we’ve been doing it because we’re throwing away the majority of the evidence.

David Capes  

So what’s the difference between dry sifting and wet sifting. How do you proceed to do that? What do you mean wet sifting exactly?

Scott Stripling  

So, we set up a portable station that has water that we’re recycling at Shiloh. We have our own water tower, and it’s quite fancy. At Mount Ebal, we just set up a portable tank that had a pump that was cycling water so that we had pressure and hoses. So the matrix, after it’s been dry sifted, then goes and it’s washed like with a pressure hose and cleaned and washed again. And now once the dirt is off of it, all of a sudden, what looked like a rock, is a scarab. See for every one scarab we used to find we’re now finding five and for every one bulla we used to find we’re now finding five. A bulla is a clay impression. So it’s clay that’s been impressed with a scarab or a sealed impression of some kind that has been thrown away. Because when they’re covered with dirt, how’s a volunteer supposed to know what that is? But when it’s washed all the sudden those things pop.

David Capes  

Good role for water out in the desert.

Scott Stripling  

I know. The washing of the water of the word. It brings a lot of things to life. 

David Capes  

That is terrific. Well, there’s an academic discussion now that is beginning. And will continue for a number of years. Is there ever going to be consensus you think, on what this text is and what it means.

Scott Stripling  

I think the person, in this case me, the lead archaeologist and the lead author on the article, always has the advantage, the home court advantage. Because we’re the ones who set out what it is. And even those who disagree, the majority will always go back to either agree with, or disagree with, or cite our original research. You had Yossi Garfinkel here at the Lanier Theological Library, here a couple of years ago. Well he’s the one who excavated the Khirbet Qeiyafa. I think it’ll be exactly like that. You’ll have Yossi as the first one who published it. So people will always go back to his original reading but say maybe it could also mean this or mean that. But they’ll have to refer to his research. I think it’ll be the same thing with this.

David Capes  

So you’re team is the starting point. And you had a team, not just you. You have a team from Israel, from Eastern Europe, as well in Germany.

Scott Stripling  

Germany, Czechoslovakia and Israel. So two epigraphers, I didn’t want just one. You know, I’m sticking my neck out pretty far on this thing. I don’t want just one epigrapher to tell me what he’s seen here. I want two different ones. One’s Christian, one’s Jewish. One’s European, one’s Israeli. I want them both to tell me that they’re seeing this and then I have to agree with them before we’re gonna move forward on it. So that was helpful to have two good epigraphers,. And then of course, the scientist in Prague where we were counting on them to give us high quality scans. Because I mean, what were we going to do without the scans?

David Capes  

Without being able to see inside because it is folded?

Scott Stripling  

Don’t we live in an interesting time to be able to do that? Yeah. even if Adam Zertal’s team had found this, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it.

David Capes  

Back in the 1980s exactly. So if people want to learn more about this particular find, how can they do that?

Scott Stripling  

Okay, Heritage Science is the journal, and so they can go to the Heritage Science site. It’s one of the Springer Journals and it’s open access. So anybody can download the article there for free. Doesn’t cost them anything. And then we will have a number of other more popular level articles that are coming out in the near future as well.

David Capes  

Very good. Dr. Scott Stripling. Thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel.

David Capes  

It’s a real joy to be with you. Thank you David.