The Bible is Art: Recent Episodes
John Higgins
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In this video we look at what beauty has to do with modesty.
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Why Samson is a good guy. Sorry about the audio.
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Audio: Ben Sound
The Decoupling of Sin: Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Hans Jonas & Hitler
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In this video I look at why college is dead and evaluate the new University of Austin.
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Sources:
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https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college
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https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender
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https://www.naceweb.org/job-market/compensation/salary-trends-through-salary-survey-a-historical-perspective-on-starting-salaries-for-new-college-graduates
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https://www.marketwatch.com/graphics/college-debt-now-and-then
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https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bloat-does-not-explain-the-rising-cost-of-education.html
In the 8th part of the series we look at the fifth and sixth fundamental aesthetic property: simplicity and complexity. And we see their theological and philosophical connections.
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There is often much more to classic fairy tales than meets the eye. In this video we take a look at the sophisticated symbolism of Beauty and the Beast.
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In this video we explore the fascinating technique of how God hides in Esther.
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Richard Dawkins believes that it would be immoral or unwise to not abort a baby if you knew he would have Downs Syndrome.
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In this video we look at the beautiful symbolism in Karen Blixen's (pen name "Isak Dinesen") short story, "Babette's Feast" (made into a film).
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In this video we look at whether all stories need happy or redemptive endings and take a look at a clip by Terry Gilliam
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Matthew 13 is the center of Matthew's Gospel and it holds some fascinating secrets.
Original Article: https://theopolisinstitute.com/the-se...
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In this video we explore why I'm against practical preaching...and why I think God is too.
Original Article: https://theopolisinstitute.com/agains...
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There's literary and moral art in Stephen's stoning is stunning. Glory be to God.
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In this video I look at some of the strange and arresting details in the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5.
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In this video we look at the nature of miracles and art with an interview with Matthew McConaughey on the Joe Rogan podcast.
Against Practical Preaching (https://theopolisinstitute.com/agains...)
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In this video I look at why Judah and Judas are so similar.
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In this video we look at how look tells the story of the healing of the Centurion's servant as a war.
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In this video we look at hierarchy, one of the fundamental properties of beauty.
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Some thoughts on the Hennessy bottle designed by the architect Frank Gehry. And symmetry. And Russell Kirk.
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We explore the beautiful pattern of the third day in the Scripture.
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In this note I chat about Trump's rhetoric and the theology of laughter.
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A few questions to think about regarding political signs and architecture.
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In the 5th part of the series we look at the two most fundamental aesthetic properties: unity and diversity. And we see their theological and philosophical connections.
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In this video we’re looking at why the chief priests buy a field with the money Judas gives back to them.
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Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com Twitter: @johnbhiggins Video Essay on "The Peanut Butter Falcon" - https://youtu.be/4Qn2kW1Jxww
| Transcription | In the book The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Meir Sternberg has a chapter on gaps in stories. He says that “To understand a literary work, we have to answer, in the course of reading, a series of such questions as: What is happening or has happened, and why? What connects the present event or situation to what went before, and how do both relate to what will probably come after? What are the features, motives, or designs of this or that character? How does he view his fellow characters? And what norms govern the existence and conduct of all?” And it is in answering these questions, these gaps, that we will make sense of the work. But the problem is that “few of the answers to these questions have been explicitly provided [in the text]...From the viewpoint of what is directly given in the language, the literary work consists of bits and fragments to be linked and pieced together in the process of reading: it establishes a system of gaps that must be filled in.” And Sternberg notes that this is true with all stories, not just complicated ones. For instance, he tells a Hebrew nursery rhyme that goes like this “Every day, that’s the way Jonathan goes out to play. Climbed a tree. What did he see? Birdies: one, two, three! Naughty boy! What have we seen? There’s a hole in your new jeans!” We assume that Jonathan got the hole in his jeans from the tree, but that is nowhere said, we had to piece that together. Gaps are especially important in a film that deals with hiddennes. So let’s look at Terrence Malick’s film, A Hidden Life, and fill in some gaps. On the surface, A Hidden Life is about an Austrian farmer, Franz Jägerstätter, his wife and three daughters during World War II. The film follows the struggle of the family as Franz becomes a conscientious objector who is jailed and then executed. The title of the film is taken from George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. The quote in full reads, that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts ... is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” The most obvious meaning of the film is that the hidden life upon which the good of the world is dependent is Franz and his family. But how Malick directs this hidden life reveals depths of his art and the art of Franz’s life. There are many things hidden in this film. Perhaps most strikingly, World War II itself is hidden. While we see some historical footage of Hitler, the SS, some fire, Malick chose to show nothing of the war proper, no warfare, no fighting. The most obvious and popular aspects of the war he has hidden from us.
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com Twitter: @johnbhiggins | Best Books on How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art | Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa) Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb) The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk) Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C) The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
| Transcription | The story of Zacchaeus is one of the most well known stories in the gospels. But when you read it there is a strange information distribution. Now, what’s information distribution? One of the helpful things that you can do when you’re trying to understand a story, especially a well-known one, is look at how much information is devoted to each major section or event or character in the story. The purpose of doing this is to see what the author actually focuses on, what he wants us to pay attention to. Because if it’s a very well-known story our attention naturally gravitates toward the parts that are popular. So let’s look at the information distribution in our story. The story of Zacchaeus is short, it takes less than a minute to read, so let’s read the whole thing: He entered Jericho and was passing through. And look, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” The story consists of 10 verses. Seven of the verses happen outside with the crowd with Zacchaeus running up in a tree and coming down and the crowd grumbling. Only three verses are the conversation between Jesus and Zacchaeus, you could say the moral of the story. So we have a strange amount of attention on Zacchaeus’ action and the tree. I mean, why have all the stuff about the tree anyways couldn’t we just have the conversation in the house, Zacchaeus telling Jesus that he’ll give away a bunch of his stuff and Jesus saying that salvation has come here? One of the fundamental features of great art, whether it’s architecture, music, or literature, is that all the parts work together to make the whole, all the parts, the sentences, the words, the images contribute to the main thesis of the work. So there’s never a shape or a note or an image that’s not serving the goal of the work. So let’s look at the craft of Luke and how these images and actions contribute to his message.
Luke opens the story like this: “He entered Jericho and was passing through.” (Luke 19:1) Jesus has just about finished his journey to Jerusalem that started 10 chapters earlier and just like the journey of Israel in the wilderness ended with them passing through Jericho, so Jesus passes through Jericho. But this is not a little detail to fill out the scene, Luke is showing us that this Jericho scene is parallel to the Jericho scene in the book of Joshua.
In this video I Iook at the the symbolism and meaning of Jesus being laid in a manger as well why there is a Joseph (Jesus' adopted father) at the beginning and and a Joseph (Joseph of Arimathea) a the end of the (some) of the Gospels.
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| Best Books on How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
In this video I look at the first words of Ahab.
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
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Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
| Best Books on How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
In this video we look at the fundamental properties of beauty.
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
| Best Books on How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this video I look at Matthew's quote from Micah 5 in Matthew chapter 2 when the scribes tell Herod were the Christ is to be born.
There's more going on that you might think.
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| How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
In this video I look at the meaning of the number of the beast: 666.
G.K Beale's Article: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/why-is-the-number-of-the-beast-666/
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
| How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
In this video we look at the art of the whole book of Deuteronomy.
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
| How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
In this 3rd video in the series "A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design" I look at what makes something beautiful.
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Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this video we explain the literary art of Ecclesiastes 3.
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Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
| How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
| Literary Structure |
Literary Structure of the Old Testament (https://amzn.to/30Jdm8X)
Style And Structure In Biblical Hebrew Narrative (https://amzn.to/2RDTTlQ)
| Genesis |
Creation: The Story of Beginnings - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2GlPwq9)
Abram to Abraham: A Literary Analysis of the Abraham Narrative - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2v7id7Z)
Narrative Art in Genesis - Fokkelman (https://amzn.to/2ulmd4t)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part I) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2NOAhdt)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part II) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2Gcuk6d)
Genesis: A Commentary - Waltke (https://amzn.to/2vaBvt7)
The Gospel of Genesis: Studies in Protology and Eschatology - Gage (https://amzn.to/2RGjRFo)
Abraham and All the Families of the Earth: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 12-50 - Janzen (https://amzn.to/2TVyCqJ)
Genesis 1-15, Volume 1 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/2TQnYRO)
Genesis 16-50, Volume 2 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/3aDY21J)
| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re going to explore that great poem in Ecclesiastes 3 about Time.
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
Whenever you have a text this famous and repetitive, in order to understand the depth of the art of the author, you have to pay precise attention to the particularities. What words and phrases and in what order. What words does he choose not to use. What repetitions or omissions, patterns, and breaks in pattern. We need...
In this video we're looking at Ezekiel's fascinating literary art where he connects dates and measurements to create a literary Temple.
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
| How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
| Literary Structure |
Literary Structure of the Old Testament (https://amzn.to/30Jdm8X)
Style And Structure In Biblical Hebrew Narrative (https://amzn.to/2RDTTlQ)
| Genesis |
Creation: The Story of Beginnings - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2GlPwq9)
Abram to Abraham: A Literary Analysis of the Abraham Narrative - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2v7id7Z)
Narrative Art in Genesis - Fokkelman (https://amzn.to/2ulmd4t)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part I) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2NOAhdt)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part II) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2Gcuk6d)
Genesis: A Commentary - Waltke (https://amzn.to/2vaBvt7)
The Gospel of Genesis: Studies in Protology and Eschatology - Gage (https://amzn.to/2RGjRFo)
Abraham and All the Families of the Earth: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 12-50 - Janzen (https://amzn.to/2TVyCqJ)
Genesis 1-15, Volume 1 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/2TQnYRO)
Genesis 16-50, Volume 2 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/3aDY21J)
| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re talking about where Ezekiel’s New Temple is.
Ezekiel is a strange book and its strange in many ways. One of the ways it is strange is that there are a lot of numbers in Ezekiel. And these numbers come in two forms. First, there are dates and second, there are measurements.
Regarding the first, there are more dates in Ezekiel than any other book in the Bible, 14 in total. And most of the time they’re very precise, including the year, month, and day. For instance, in the first verse of Ezekiel it says, “In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month…” So why all these dates?
Some have thought that they relate to something that happened on or around those dates that we might know about from other sources inside or outside the Bible, but the problem is that we can’t make it work, most of them don’t really line up with other events we know about. Now it’s certainly possible that it may relate to other events, but before offer that...
In this second video in the series A Christian Guide to Beauty & Design I talk about the objectivity of beauty.
Video 1 - Introduction (https://youtu.be/xDe5X6Yl-WI)
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
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Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
Images: Paweł Czerwiński (https://unsplash.com/@pawel_czerwinski)
| Transcription |
Welcome back to The Bible is Art. We are currently in a series where I bring you along with me as I write a book on a Christian Guide to Beauty and Design. This week we’re talking about the objectivity of beauty.
Beauty is objective. That is, when I say that poster or a painting is beautiful or well designed, I am saying something about the work, not something about how I feel about it. I’m not offering a preference. I am saying something about the work’s nature or essence, it’s structure and the relations between its parts. You certainly should feel a preference toward beautiful things, but that has nothing to do with whether it is or is not beautiful. Whether you have good feelings toward a well designed painting is predicated upon your aesthetic development, a topic I shall discuss later when we talk about the Fall and Aesthetic Discipleship.
No all this is confused by our language. When we point to a poster, a painting, or album cover and say that it’s “good” or “beautiful”, that could mean three things. First, it could mean that I am saying something objective about it, that it is well designed, that is, it has the properties of a beautiful design. Second, It could mean a subjective preference. That is, I am saying something about myself and my internal state that may or may not relate to objective features of the object. Or third, both. That is, I am saying that I do think the object is objectively well designed and I subjectively enjoy it.
Unfortunately, this linguistic confusion has caused a lot of confusion in aesthetics. It has contributed one more brick in the house of relativism. But there is no need to conclude that beauty is subjective because of an opaqueness in our language.
Let me pause here. While there are subjective aesthetic preferences (for instance, cultural or individual preferences for certain colors or patterns), this has no effect on the objectivity of beauty and its properties. Just as people have preferences for different types of food, there are foundational properties of what makes good food for humans. Arsenic, for example, would not be good food. But the existence or culinary preferences in no way affects the necessary properties to make something good food. Okay, back to the argument.
Beauty, good design is objective. It is a feature of objects and we know this for a number of reasons.
Intuition. Most people naturally believe that beauty exists and that when we identify something as beautiful we are saying something about that thing and not something about ourselves. And if that’s a natural intuition, we would need to have a really good reason to disbelieve.
Individual Practice. Every wife assumes that when you tell her she is beautiful that you are saying something about her, not you. And the same goes for the Grand Canyon, iPhones, and stories. And if this is our common practice, the way we live. And there is intelligence in our actions. And, once again, we only need to change our assumption if we have reasons to do so. And I don’t think we do.
Commercial Practice. When you read standard graphic design texts the rules for good design are universal and widely agreed upon. And when you...
In this video I look at Matthew's quotation from Isaiah 7, "The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel."
Map from Holman Bible Atlas (https://www.amazon.com/Holman-Bible-A...).
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Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
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| How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
| Literary Structure |
Literary Structure of the Old Testament (https://amzn.to/30Jdm8X)
Style And Structure In Biblical Hebrew Narrative (https://amzn.to/2RDTTlQ)
| Genesis |
Creation: The Story of Beginnings - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2GlPwq9)
Abram to Abraham: A Literary Analysis of the Abraham Narrative - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2v7id7Z)
Narrative Art in Genesis - Fokkelman (https://amzn.to/2ulmd4t)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part I) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2NOAhdt)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part II) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2Gcuk6d)
Genesis: A Commentary - Waltke (https://amzn.to/2vaBvt7)
The Gospel of Genesis: Studies in Protology and Eschatology - Gage (https://amzn.to/2RGjRFo)
Abraham and All the Families of the Earth: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 12-50 - Janzen (https://amzn.to/2TVyCqJ)
Genesis 1-15, Volume 1 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/2TQnYRO)
Genesis 16-50, Volume 2 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/3aDY21J)
| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible as art, where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible. And this week, we're talking about that great quotation from Isaiah, “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel. And we will see how this is one of the most misunderstood texts in the entire Bible.
In Matthew’s Gospel, after the Angel visits Joseph and tells him to marry Mary and to name Jesus Jesus, Matthew, the narrator, tell us that “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet” and then Matthew quotes from Isaiah, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.” Which means “God with us.”
Now, the most important principle that we have to understand when we are trying to understand how the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, is that most of the time they are referring to more than just the verse that they...
I'm starting a new series on a Christian Guide to Beauty and Design and I introduce it in this video
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| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is Art and this week we’re starting a new series on A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design.
For awhile now I’ve been writing a book. And I’ve been writing a book because it didn’t exist. You see, years ago I was teaching a high school course on Christian Worldview where we had sections on every main area of knowledge. So we had a Christian view of economics, science, ethics, mathematics and aesthetics, the study of beauty and design.
And as I looked for material on Christian aesthetics I found that the books that were available were too broad, that is, books talking about the general importance of beauty in the Bible or theology. There wasn’t anything that talked about what makes something beautiful, visually beautiful for a Christian.
So life went on and my professional life moved into design and photography. So while my undergraduate and graduate training was in Biblical Studies, Philosophy, and Theology, my professional work was and is in an aesthetic discipline. And as I lived in the worlds of design and theology, some very obvious connections became clear to me. But in discussions with people and reading books on beauty, these simple insights were missing.
It was for these reasons that I started to write a book on A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design. But as I was writing, I also started this YouTube channel and decided to just release videos on it as I write the book. That way I can get feedback and the book can be truer, better, and I hope more beautiful. So the goal of these videos and the book is simply this: to explain what makes something beautiful and why.
And with that let me leave you with these words from the poet Francis Thompson:
“The Church, which was once the mother of poets no less than of saints, during the last two centuries has relinquished to aliens the chief glories of poetry, she has retained the palm, but forgone the laurel. Fathers of the Church (we should say), pastors of the Church, pious laics of the Church: you are taking from its walls the panoply of Aquinas; take also from its walls the psaltery of Alighieri.
Unroll the precedents of the Church's past; recall in your minds that Francis of Assisi was among the precursors of Dante, that sworn to poverty he forswore not Beauty, but discerned through the lamp Beauty the Light God. What you theoretically know vividly realize: that with many the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, that is only evil when divorced from the worship of Primal Beauty.”
In this video I look at the dense style of biblical authors and show how rich it can be with 1 verse: Genesis 37:2.
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| How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
| Literary Structure |
Literary Structure of the Old Testament (https://amzn.to/30Jdm8X)
Style And Structure In Biblical Hebrew Narrative (https://amzn.to/2RDTTlQ)
| Genesis |
Creation: The Story of Beginnings - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2GlPwq9)
Abram to Abraham: A Literary Analysis of the Abraham Narrative - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2v7id7Z)
Narrative Art in Genesis - Fokkelman (https://amzn.to/2ulmd4t)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part I) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2NOAhdt)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part II) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2Gcuk6d)
Genesis: A Commentary - Waltke (https://amzn.to/2vaBvt7)
The Gospel of Genesis: Studies in Protology and Eschatology - Gage (https://amzn.to/2RGjRFo)
Abraham and All the Families of the Earth: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 12-50 - Janzen (https://amzn.to/2TVyCqJ)
Genesis 1-15, Volume 1 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/2TQnYRO)
Genesis 16-50, Volume 2 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/3aDY21J)
| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re talking about the dense style of biblical narrators’ as well as the sophistication you can achieve in one verse.
Let me read to you two different styles of storytelling. First, Thomas Hardy from his book Under the Greenwood Tree. This is the first sentence:
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality. (Thomas Hardy,)
And this is one of the first sentences from the Joseph story, “Joseph, being seventeen years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers.”
Notice the difference? The biblical narrators are sparse, not florid, unadorned, but dense, dense with meaning and symbolism,...
In this video we look at the symbolism of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh.
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
Twitter: @johnbhiggins
| How to Learn to Read the Bible as Literary Art |
Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (https://amzn.to/30LzaRa)
Narrative Art in the Bible (https://amzn.to/30RVGIb)
The Art of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/3aDrIfk)
Old Testament Narrative: A Guide to Interpretation (https://amzn.to/38rcE2C)
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (https://amzn.to/2Gh4cqE)
| Literary Structure |
Literary Structure of the Old Testament (https://amzn.to/30Jdm8X)
Style And Structure In Biblical Hebrew Narrative (https://amzn.to/2RDTTlQ)
| Genesis |
Creation: The Story of Beginnings - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2GlPwq9)
Abram to Abraham: A Literary Analysis of the Abraham Narrative - Grossman (https://amzn.to/2v7id7Z)
Narrative Art in Genesis - Fokkelman (https://amzn.to/2ulmd4t)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part I) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2NOAhdt)
A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Part II) - Cassuto (https://amzn.to/2Gcuk6d)
Genesis: A Commentary - Waltke (https://amzn.to/2vaBvt7)
The Gospel of Genesis: Studies in Protology and Eschatology - Gage (https://amzn.to/2RGjRFo)
Abraham and All the Families of the Earth: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 12-50 - Janzen (https://amzn.to/2TVyCqJ)
Genesis 1-15, Volume 1 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/2TQnYRO)
Genesis 16-50, Volume 2 - Wenham (https://amzn.to/3aDY21J)
| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re looking at the symbolism of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, and its both different and deeper than I originally thought.
We all know the story. Jesus is born and wise men come and bring three gifts to Jesus, Gold, frankincense, and Myrrh. But the question I want to explore is why three gifts and why these gifts.
As always in the Bible, if you’re trying to understand something the answer is often found in something that came before. And Gold, frankincense, and Myrrh have all appeared in the Bible before. And while these different things occur in different places in the OT, they only occur together in one place, The Temple and Tabernacle.
Gold was the characteristic material in the Holy of Holies. The ark of the covenant was made of solid gold and the room was overlaid with gold.
Frankincense was used in the offerings, specifically the grain or gift offering. And these offerings only happened at the temple in the first section or courtyard of the temple.
Myrrh was used as the first ingredient in...
The Peanut Butter Falcon is an exquisite piece of literary craft and in this video I explore some of the symbolism of the film.
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Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
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| Transcription |
The Peanut Butter Falcon is a work of the highest literary and dramatic skill. But because it has been described by many critics as a “feel good movie” I worry that its depth, symbolism, careful attention to detail, surgical development of themes and images might be lost. So in praise of this great film, let’s look at the art of the Peanut Butter Falcon.
Peanut Butter Falcon is a story about Zak, Tyler and Eleanor. Zak is a 22 year old with Down Syndrome who wants to escape his retirement home where has lived since his family abandoned him and to go to a professional wrestling training camp. Tyler, also a young man, fisherman, and thief has a hard time keeping down jobs because he lost his brother one night when he fell asleep at the wheel. After setting fire to a rival’s fisherman's gear, Tyler sets on the road to Florida where he runs into Zak whom Tyler agrees to take to the wrestling school in Florida.
Eleanor works at the retirement home where Zak lives and will chase after after him before joining their journey
Like any good journey narrative, this external journey mirrors the internal journey, the transformation of persons and relationships.
Zak and Tyler as a pair are contrasting as well as complementary, similar and different. That is, they have multiple needs, multiple things that need transformation and one of them they share and one is different.
They’re similar in that they have both lost family and need a new one. But they are different in the following ways. Tyler is self-sufficient/independent and able-bodied, Zak is dependent and has a physical difficulty. And as they go through their journey both their similar needs and different difficulties will be transformed. Tyler’s journey will be a journey out of self-sufficiency and selfishness while Zak’s will be a journey out of his self-perception of deformity, disabled. And they will find this as they create a new family
The first two scenes of the movie open with solitary characters. A shot of Zak and then a shot of Tyler, symbolically communicating their lack of family, their loneliness. This will symbolically change by the end of the movie where the last frame will be Zak, Tyler, and Eleanor, a worker at the retirement home who will run away with them. But let’s not jump too quickly to the end.
When the story begins Tyler is stealing crabs from other fishermans’ traps. The other fisherman confront him, beat him up, and then Tyler sets fire to their equipment. The fisherman see the fire and start to chase after Tyler. Tyler escapes in a boat that unbeknownst to him, Zak hid himself in, looking for anyway to get to his wrestling school.
After some convincing, Tyler finally agrees to drop Zak off at the school on his way to Florida. Notice, Tyler begins thinking two false assumptions: first, that they are on different journeys and second, that he is leading Zak.
The first rule that Tyler establishes is that Zak cannot slow him down. So between geographically leading them and physically being faster, Tyler assumes that he is the independent, strong one, leading a physically slow, Down Syndrome boy down south.
But Tyler doesn’t realize that leading the physical journey pales in comparison to the importance of the internal journey of transformation and in that journey he is the follower.
This inversion of the leader follower...
In this video I look at why Mary's birth looks like infidelity and why Joseph's righteousness is strange.
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| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible. And this week we’re talking about some strange and lovely things about Jesus’ birth.
Matthew begins his gospel with an expansive, and exhaustive genealogy. Where Jesus is identified with the highest members of the Israelite family. Kings, priests, prophets, and psalmists. And in all this Jesus is this climactic cumulative character encompassing all of humanity in his body. This is the king about whom this gospel will be about.
And in line with this grand backstory Matthew announces to us that he will now give us the story of this King’s birth. But as will become a theme in Matthew’s gospel this opening story does not unfold as we are expecting.
Here’s what the text says, Matthew 1:18–21:
Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.
But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
With Jesus’ pedigree we are expecting a parade. But instead, King Jesus’ birth almost divides a family, causing a divorce. Furthermore, his birth will look like infidelity, adultery. Mary is pregnant without being with a man.
Now why did this climactic king’s birth take place in this strange way? Matthew could have easily left it out and he did not include it just for its drama or to give the story texture. So why did he include it? And why did God design his son’s birth in this manner?
Well first, as we saw in the video about women in Matthew’s genealogy, there is an appearance of infidelity, impurity, but in reality, it is the exact opposite. Mary appears to have been impure, sleeping with another man and becoming pregnant, but in reality she has the purity of soul to accept the savior into her body.
You see, Jesus’ whole ministry will have this same shape. He will constantly be accused of violating the law, of sinning, but in reality he is doing the opposite. He is accused of sin because he is healing on the Sabbath when in reality he was doing what the Sabbath was designed for, the restoration of life.
And this is the same shape of Jesus‘s greatest act. It will appear to be the opposite of what it is. It will appear to be defeat when in reality it is victory.
Second, this strange birth will show us the first example of the different kind of righteousness that Jesus describes. Remember, he will say that we need to have a righteousness that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees. But he is not talking about in quantity, just more righteous acts, but in quality. There is a new kind of righteousness that is needed.
Notice, our narrator, for the first time in the Gospel has evaluated a character as righteous. In verse 19 it says, “And Joseph, being a righteous man…” And given how uncommon it is for biblical narrators to give explicit evaluation of characters, why here?
You see, Joseph exemplifies the...
In Matthew 1, Matthew changes two names in the genealogy and he has a fascinating reason for doing so.
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In this video I look at how Jesus reverse the first two sins in the Bible in the last scene in John 21.
Article on Matthew 13: The Secret of the Middle of Matthew (https://theopolisinstitute.com/the-se...)
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In this video I explore the strange and wonderful art of John 21 and its allusions to Genesis 1-3.
Article on Matthew 13: The Secret of the Middle of Matthew (https://theopolisinstitute.com/the-se...)
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| Transcription|
I love John 21, the last chapter in John’s gospel. And I love it because it’s weird and there’s a lot of things to figure out. So let’s review what John 21 is about. After Jesus’ resurrection seven of his disciples go fishing during the night. They’re unfruitful in the work, not catching any fish, but in the morning, a man calls out to them from the land and gives them instructions how to fish better and then their catch is enormous.
Realizing that the man who gave them the instructions is Jesus, Peter puts on his clothes and jumps into the water to swim to him. The disciples then have a meal with Jesus. After the meal Jesus gives Peter work to do, feeding and ruling over animals, sheep. The final episode in the scene is on a path, following Jesus. So that’s John 21.
And there are many things that are puzzling about this story. First, the existence of the story itself is puzzling. This is because it seemed like the book of John should have ended at the end of the previous scene. I mean, listen to the last verses of John 20:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
That sounds like a grand conclusion. But John adds a whole nother scene, why?
Another thing that’s puzzling is why this long section about fishing? Or why does Peter put on his clothes to jump in the water, why seven disciples, why don’t they recognize Jesus, why is there 153 fish, and so on. Much like chapter 32 in Moby Dick, where Ishmael catalogs whale species to the boredom of readers throughout history, it’s there for a reason, the author means for it to feel out of place because that encourages the readers to engage with the story more deeply.
Now most of the time when you don’t understand something in the Bible, it is because you haven’t understood something that has come before. And to understand what John is doing with this last scene, we have to review some of the story of John’s gospel.
John opens his Gospel with the strongest allusion to the first chapter of the Bible, “In the beginning…” And this is because in John’s Gospel, Jesus is bringing in a new creation. There are allusions to Genesis 1-3 all throughout John. For instance, John opens his gospel with seven days.
And much like John’s other book, Revelation, where you have seven seals that give way to seven bowls, seven following or opening up to seven more, these first seven days climax with the first of seven signs or miracles in John’s gospel.
And these seven signs allude to the seven days of the creation week, by these acts Jesus is making a new creation.
But if you remember back to the beginning of the Bible, Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden and an angel with a firey sword was set outside to protect the garden from intruders. So in order to get back into the garden to be with God and to start over, someone needs to go through that firey sword.
And that’s what Jesus does. He dies, and...
In this video I respond to Alain de Botton's School of Life video entitled "How to Replace the 10 Commandments" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwVJJ...). In the process we'll look at what makes the 10 commandments literarily and morally sophisticated.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
twitter: @johnbhiggins
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
Some time ago the philosopher Alain de Botton’s School of Life released a video called “How to Replace the 10 Commandments.” He said that they “maintain an extraordinary hold on our imaginations” but the problem is that they sound “peculiar” today. They were for a particular people and thus they are a bit parochial.
In their stead he offers his own ten commandments. And before you watch this video you should watch his that I’ve linked in the description. Even though many of his commandments relish Alain’s gentle and careful character, they should not replace the ten commandments in the Bible. And that is because they’re inferior. G.K. Chesterton said that before you tear a fence down, you probably should figure out why it was put there in the first place. So let’s look at the art of the ten commandments and the 10 reasons they are superior:
Length - The Biblical Ten Commandments are 172 words compared to Alain’s which have 614. Alain’s are much much longer. Well, why does that matter. Perhaps the ten commandments have such an extraordinary hold on our imagination because of their pithiness. It's difficult to hold something in our imagination if it won't fit. This summary of the moral law was composed not simply to provide moral knowledge but provide it pedagogically. Not just as a list of good things to do but it was designed for consumption and memorization.
Moral reasons - Alain’s ten commandments do not give us any reason why we should follow his commandments. The Bible’s ten commandments by contrast begin with “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery.” The reason why they ought to follow these is because God freed them from slavery. It is quite a more anemic motivation to listen to Alain “simply because he said so.” A moral life requires both reasons for obligation as well as robust motivation - a requirement certainly met with manumission from slavery, as in the biblical ten commandments. And when we are faced with grave temptation to evil, cheating on a spouse, extorting money at work, simply having a list of guidelines without any strong account of obligation won’t do any good. A list, even a profound and elegant one may be wonderful, but that doesn't provide a binding or exciting obligation.
Moral epistemology - perhaps the strangest part of Alain commandments is that we are never told how we know them. It is as if someone strolls into you office and tells you a list of instructions without sharing with you who they are or on what authority they offer the commands. The Ten Commandments begin with “I am the Lord your God” that is how we know these commandments, by God telling us. Therefore we can expect that deeper insight or clarification on moral knowledge will come from the same source. Should or ought we go to Alain for further insight? Did he get them from somewhere? We’re simply left to wonder.
Form/Order - Like every great work of art, one of...
In this video I look at the literary art of the whole book of Exodus.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
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website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
twitter: @johnbhiggins
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
The book of Exodus is organized into 3 sections that follow the Israelites from Egypt through the wilderness to Mt. Sinai. So the literary structure looks like this. Israel in Egypt, Israel in the wilderness, and Israel at Mt. Sinai.
Exodus is a journey narrative like many of the great stories from The Odyssey, to the Aeneid, to The Divine Comedy, to Pilgrim’s Progress, to Lord of the Rings. And the central idea is that the physical journey symbolizes a moral, spiritual, intellectual, or theological journey where the travelers begin in one moral or spiritual place and move to another. In Exodus, Israel begins in slavery and journeys to freedom, Sabbath rest at Mount Sinai.
And the symbolic structure works both vertically and horizontally. Horizontally they move from Egypt to Mt. Sinai, one location to another miles away. Vertically, they begin low, at sea level at the Nile river and move up to a mountain.
The Israelites begin as servants to Pharaoh and end as servants to God. They begin in Pharaoh’s house and end God’s house, the tabernacle. They begin by listening to Pharaoh and his laws and end by listening to God and his laws. They begin by building for Pharaoh, remember the storage cities of Pithom and Ramses, and conclude by building God’s house.
So the author has written all of these symmetries that develop throughout the journey, but the structure of the story goes one level deeper. But to understand the symbolism of why the author structured the book into three sections, we have to review some of the details of the book of Exodus.
In Egypt, Israel is enslaved and God calls Moses at the burning bush to deliver his people. God then plagues his people with all manner of elements including raining down fire and delivers his people through the sea. In the Wilderness on the way to Mt. Sinai, God leads his people in a pillar of fire and cloud that illumines their way. Israel complains about the food and God provides them with manna, bread from heaven. When they arrive at Mt. Sinai the firey glory-cloud rests on the mountain and the elders travel up into it to have a meal with God. Moses receives the law as well as the instructions for building the tabernacle.
Now why have I summarized the book? The climax of the book, and the thing that gets the most space is the tabernacle - the detailed instructions and then the account of the actual construction. The tabernacle occupies 40% of the book of Exodus - 16 out of 40 chapters.
But not only did Moses spend a lot of time talking about the tabernacle, he designed the book to be a literary tabernacle. Just like the Book of Exodus is organized into three sections, geographically designed as Israel journeys from Egypt through the wilderness to Mt. Sinai, so the Tabernacle is organized into three sections through which you may journey: the courtyard, the holy place, and the holy of holies.
But the numerical connections are only the beginning. The events throughout the book correspond to objects in each section of the tabernacle.
For instance, in the courtyard there is the altar for offerings and the bronze basin for washings. These correspond...
In this video I look at the fascinating things that Matthew is doing when he quotes Jesus in another language than the rest of the gospel, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani", "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46).
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
twitter: @johnbhiggins
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re looking at why Matthew has Jesus speak in a foreign language from the cross and then translates it. And I know that doesn’t sound interesting but I promise it is super fascinating.
When Jesus is on the cross Matthew tells us that he “cried out with a loud voice, saying, "ey-li, ey-li, lema, sabachth-ani? That is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" That is, Matthew is giving the original words that Jesus spoke. Now this is strange.
Matthew’s Gospel was written in Greek and Jesus’ normal everyday language was Aramaic. Nowhere else in his Gospel does Matthew give us the original Aramaic words of Jesus. All the rest of the words of Jesus were originally in Aramaic but Matthew chose to translate them into Greek for the Gospel. So why have them foreign only here?
You might think it’s because it’s important, and while that’s certainly true that can’t be the only reason because other places like sermon on the mount or resurrection don’t have a different language. So there has to be something about its differentness, it’s foreignness.
Matthew uses a foreign language to the text, a different language from the rest of the Gospel, because what is happening is so foreign. The form matches the content. God’s anointed king is killed, forsaken by his Father. This is the most unknown foreign event conceivable. It is fitting, therefore, that the language used to communicate it equally foreign and strange.
But Matthew goes one step further. He interprets it. After he quotes Jesus’ Aramaic, Matthew said, “That is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Why does Matthew translate what he had made foreign? I mean, if he was going to translate it anyway, why go to the trouble to include the original, untranslated language in the first place?
Think about what we just saw about Matthew’s reason for making it foreign. He made the language foreign because the content, the thing it was describing, Jesus being forsaken by his Father, was so foreign.
So if Matthew translates it, that means that the foreignness won’t remain foreign. And if the language mirrors reality, perhaps the death, the Father abandoning, that is so foreign to Jesus’ life will also be interpreted, translated into something intelligible. Perhaps this capital punishment will become a sacrifice, an entombed carcass a seed.
In this video we look at the literary parallel of Jesus and Samson in the annunciation in Matthew 1:18-25.
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| Transcription |
Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re talking about the riddles of Jesus and Samson.
Let me read for you the annunciation scene from Matthew’s Gospel:
“Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, look, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife,
for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us). When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus”
There are many parallels in the OT to Jesus’ annunciation, where the angels come and announce that a woman will have a son. For instance, Sarah and Hannah both have angels visit them with this news. But the closest parallel is to Samson’s mother. So why make the strongest connection to Samson, what connection does Matthew want us to make between Samson and Jesus?
Samson is a strange judge and he’s different from the 11 other judges. His is the longest narrative and it is also the most puzzling.
Samson was a nazirite from birth. A nazirite was someone who specially devoted themselves to God for some period of time, in Samson’s case, his whole life. And there were some rules for being a nazirite, one of them being no touching dead animals and no eating or drinking anything from the vine. Another law that will be important for understanding Samson is that the Israelites were not to marry wives of some foreign places. And finally, we have to remember that the author of Hebrews places Samson in the hall of faith among the men and women of greatest faith.
With this as the background we can start puzzling over Samson. The first thing that Samson does in the story is demand a Philistine wife. His parents protest but Samson insists. Seems like not an ideal first action for the climactic judge.
Next, when he goes down to get his wife he stops in the vineyards of the city of Timnah. Strike two, why would he stop in a vineyard when he couldn’t partake of anything there?
While he’s there a lion attacks him and he kills it, presumably touching a dead animal, then later he will scoop out honey that is in that dead animal. Strike three.
Now if Samson is so great, as the author of Hebrews tells us, if he’s the climactic Judge, which he is, and if his birth is the closest parallel to Jesus, and it is, why all the disobedience? Why all the strangeness?
And we haven’t even talked about all the weird things. Not only does he kill a lion and eat honey out of it but he presents puzzles to his enemies, has strength in his hair, and ties foxes tails together, lighting them on fire to destroy crops, and, this might be the craziest thing, in the end commits suicide. I mean, what’s...
In this video I look at the three things that Matthew does with women in his genealogy in Matthew chapter 1.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
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twitter: @johnbhiggins
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
In a previous video we saw how there are two steps to understanding genealogies. First, find the pattern of the genealogy. And second, look for how the author breaks the pattern.
The pattern that Matthew creates is that he follows the family by the male head of the household. So you have a man who fathered another man who fathered another man. That’s the pattern. But in four places Matthew will break that pattern. That is, he will include four women.
But the break in the pattern is even more unexpected because he doesn’t include the women we are expecting. Matthew does include many of the males we were expecting from reading the story up to this point in the Bible. So we have David and Judah and Abraham, famous people. And if that pattern continued we would expect all of the great matriarchs to be included when he decides to include women. Like Sarah or Abigail. But none of them are included.
Now this is very strange. Imagine if you were reading your family tree and when it came time to list the wives, all the most popular ones were missing and other less popular family members were included instead. You would either think there was a mistake or whoever composed the family tree had a reason, a purpose for doing this.
So what is Matthew’s purpose? Who does Matthew include and why? Well, Matthew includes: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.
Now, before we talk about why Matthew does this we have to remember what the purpose of this genealogy is. And that is it’s designed to characterize, to teach us who Jesus is and what his kingdom is like that he is bringing. The genealogy is not here to tell us about these people listed in the genealogy.
So what is it about these women that tell us about Jesus. There are three important things.
First, three of these women were gentiles and one was married to a gentile. Tamar and Rahab were canaanites, Ruth a moabite, and Bathsheba was married to a Hittite. So Jesus is both Jew and Gentile
Second, they’re women. Women were not typically included in genealogies. Not because women were unimportant or not included in Israel, but Jesus and his kingdom will somehow reach out and include women in a different or fuller sort of way.
And third, and most fascinating, these women are all connected to some sort of sexually questionable behavior. Tamar disguises herself and tricks Judah into sleeping with her, thus impregnating her. Rahab was a prostitute. Ruth snuck into bed with a man and told him to do whatever he liked. And Bathsheba slept with David while she was married.
In this video I explore the literary art of Matthew's genealogy in Matthew chapter 1. We look at the symbolism of numbers and the structure of the genealogy.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
twitter: @johnbhiggins
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
Genealogies might look boring. But every profession trades in particularities. Biology has cells, programmers have bits of code, and designers have colors and shapes. The particularities here are people, people particularities, the best kind.
And particularities make up the language like letters. Of course you won’t appreciate the fullness of Goethe if you don’t know german.
So you have to become a practitioner, understanding what you’re looking at when you’re looking at genealogies. All of a genre of music sounds the same only when you haven’t listened to much of it. All code looks the same until you know how to program.
We’re all very familiar with stories so stories are immediately interesting, but if we were as familiar with genealogies, we would find them just as fascinating. E = mc2 doesn’t mean much to a child, but those 5 characters, 5 particularities were among the greatest intellectual feats of human history, just five characters.
So what are the particularities of this art?
Well if you want to understand genealogies there are two steps. First, you have to identify the pattern. Second, you need to identify when the pattern is broken.
First, the pattern. Genealogies are a selective retelling of a family, a family tree reduced down to a few people. It’s just picking people out of the family and organizing them in a certain way. But the different ways that you can select people and organize them will tell you different things, they will tell you the idea, the thesis of the author.
For instance, if you read a genealogy of your family and only the third child in every family was included you would puzzle over that, you would try to figure out why. What is it about the third child that’s important? Or what is it about the first and the second children that are not important?
Matthew designs his genealogy into three sections, three sections of history. And it follows this family from Abraham to Jesus in three parts. From Abraham to David, from David to the exile, and from the exile to Jesus.
Notice, even when we are looking at the most general or broad pattern, this breaking the family into three parts, you see a break in the pattern. There are three people and one event. Abraham, David, the exile in Babylon, and Jesus. Which of these things is not like the other. Now Matthew could have easily substituted Babylon for Zedekiah, the king at the time of the exile but he doesn’t why?
Matthew chose to do it this way so that it would be absolutely clear to us how Jesus relates to the exile. That is, Jesus ends the exile.
But Matthew does more with his ordering of material. He not only orders it chronologically but also numerically. Notice at the end of the genealogy everything is counted. And it’s counted in three sets of 14 generations.
In this video I explore what Matthew means in Matthew 1:1 when he says that Jesus is the "son of David" and the "son of Abraham."
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
twitter: @johnbhiggins
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
We often think that genealogies are lists of names, just a collection of people without any purpose or perspective. But nothing could be further from the truth.
In Jesus’ family tree, there are hundreds, if not thousands of names missing. So when Matthew composed this family tree he very precisely chooses whom he would include and exclude, and he excludes almost everybody in the family. And when figure out why he includes the people he did we will understand the purpose of the genealogy.
First, notice how he gives the high points right at the beginning: son of David, Son of Abraham.
Now remember, this genealogy is not meant to tell us about the people listed but to tell us about Jesus, to characterize him. The character of his family is the character of him and his kingdom.
So Jesus is the son David. That is, Jesus is in the Kingly line. And he is the son of Abraham, that is he is the inheritor of that great covenant God made with Abraham.
But think about those statements again, son of David, son of Abraham. Matthew is doing something subtle. He’s not just saying that Jesus is in the family of David and Abraham but that he is their son. So who was the son of David? Solomon. And who was the son of Abraham? Issac.
So Jesus is not only like Abraham and David, he’s also like Isaac and Solomon. So how is Jesus like these figures. Well, Isaac’s great act was his self sacrifice and this will be Jesus is great act. So, from the first sentence of Matthew’s gospel there is a hint of its climax.
But what about Solomon? Solomon was known for two things, his wisdom and his temple. And it’s interesting that later in Matthew’s gospel Jesus is said to be greater than Solomon and greater than his temple.
Furthermore, we saw last week that Matthew structured his whole book around chapter 13, eight parables that explain Jesus and his kingdom. And what’s fascinating is that in chapter 13 when he’s explaining to the disciples why he’s speaking in parables he describes the parables with the same word that opens up the book of Proverbs. In Proverbs chapter 1 verse one says “the Proverbs of Solomon”, the same word as parables in Matthew. So in a sense, in the middle of Matthew's gospel are the proverbs, the wisdom of the new and greater Solomon, Jesus.
From the first verse of Matthew's gospel we learned that this Jesus is a wise temple builder who will sacrifice himself. But what we don’t know is what his temple will be like or what his sacrifice or what his wisdom will be like because it’s not going to be like the old temple or the old sacrifice. But to understand the character of this new temple and wisdom and sacrifice we will have to read the rest of Matthew’s work, the rest of his great literary art.
I this video I explore Matthew's ingenious structure of his Gospel.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
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email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
twitter: @johnbhiggins
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
There are many different ways to organize a story, how to order the scenes into a whole. And if you want more of an explanation of the different ways to structure stories, you can see the video linked in the description and in the upper right of the screen.
But we’re going to talk about what Matthew does and it’s extraordinary.
Matthew organizes his book into alternating sections of stories and teachings. And we know this not only because we see Jesus doing things and then having long speeches but also because after each of the teaching sections Matthew repeats the same phrase, “when Jesus finished saying these things…” And Matthew does this to indicate the end of each teaching section (7:28, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, 26:1).
In total there are five teachings, five blocks of teachings. And Matthew does this because he’s alluding back to the first section in the Bible, the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses. And as we saw in the last video the first sentence in Matthew alludes back to the book of Genesis, so also the arrangement as a whole alludes back to the first section in the Bible, the five books of Moses. And this is because Jesus is bringing a whole new order of reality a whole new kingdom a whole new creation. And Matthew wants to highlight that by organizing his work in the similar way to the organization of the first books of the Bible.
But wait, there’s more. You see, these teachings of Jesus relate in interesting ways. The first and the fifth teaching both happened on the mountain. The sermon on the mount and what’s traditionally called the Olivet discourse, that is, Jesus was teaching on the Mount of olives. And these teachings contrast. The sermon on the mount opens with eight blessings while the Olivet discourse opens with seven woes.
The second and the fourth teaching blocks are on land, in a town and both are about discipleship. In the third teaching, in Matthew chapter 13, the structural center of the book, Jesus teaches on the secrets of the kingdom. Jesus tells eight parables that he says are about the secrets, the character of the kingdom Jesus is bringing.
And it’s fascinating because Jesus has told no parables up to chapter 13 and he will tell no parables after. So Matthew has reserved all the parables for this central chapter in the book.
Now, when you first see this you might think that this very structure looks like a mountain. And Matthew emphasizes mountains, he actually has seven of them. Because one of the themes in Matthew’s gospel is that Jesus is a new Moses leading his people and giving them a new law from the mountain, the sermon on the mount. And there’s also many other fascinating parallels between Jesus and Moses that will look at another video.
But I actually don’t think that that’s what Matthew is trying to communicate with the structure. I think he’s actually doing the opposite. Let me show you what I mean.
To understand what Matthew is doing we have to look at the geographical movement in Jesus’ teachings.
Remember, there are five blocks of Jesus’ teaching.
In this chapter Jesus delivers his parables on the water. So the...
In this video I look at the first verse in Matthew's Gospel, "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham." I explore the subtle allusions Matthew chooses to begin his great masterpiece.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com
email: thisdivineart@gmail.com
twitter: @johnbhiggins
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
The first sentence in Matthew’s Gospel is this, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ.” Why start this way?
By the time we get to Matthew’s Gospel, we’re in the fifth act of a five act play, we’re at the end of the story, so where are we in the story, what’s happening?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And he created man and woman and designed a home for them in the Garden of Eden and gave them jobs to do to expand God’s kingdom of Eden to the whole wild world. And they had 1 rule, but Adam and Eve broke it. So they were kicked out, exiled from the garden.
No the interesting thing about the rest of the story in Genesis is that the book of Genesis is organized around 10 genealogies. And these genealogies start with the phrase “The book of the genealogy of” some person. So the first book in the Bible has 10 genealogies and this is very different from every other book in the Old Testament.
Well the story goes on and that same story that happened in the garden will happen again with Israel writ large. That is God will make another special place and bring his people Israel into this place and give them rules again. And once again they will disobey and be kicked out, exiled from the land.
And this is the grand story of the Old Testament. It starts high and it ends low, we start with God in God’s place and we end up without God out of God’s place. That’s the story until Matthew.
Now, what if you were Matthew and you wanted to communicate that something different, something new was going to happen how would you communicate it. Well, Matthew goes back to the first book of the Bible, and uses that same phrase that was used 10 times in the beginning. “The book of the genealogy”, and he uses it as the first thing, the first phrase in the book. Matthew is saying that what’s happening with Jesus is so fundamentally different and new that it’s like having a whole new Genesis.
And this whole new thing, this new creation starts with Jesus Christ. Now Matthew has done some subtle things here and it’s easy to miss. But to understand what he’s doing we have to compare this genealogy to the genealogies is in Genesis.
Now, the purpose of this genealogy is to tell us about Who Jesus is. For instance, right at the beginning it says Jesus is the son of David which means that he is in the kingly line and he’s the son of Abraham so he’s in the line of the covenant. But the way that Matthew structures this first sentence hints at something even deeper about who Jesus is. Look at this.
In the genealogies in Genesis they will say that it is the genealogy of a certain person. For instance Adam and then the rest of the genealogy will tell us all the people Who came from, who were generated from Adam.
So Adam produced, generated Cain and Abel. But notice the way that Matthew structures his genealogy, “the genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. By writing it in the same way as the genealogies in Genesis, Matthew is implying...
In this video I talk about the how action work with great authors. And we look at examples in Plato's Republic, Netflix's "The Bodyguard", and the Gospel of John.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) and Blake Ewing, "Linden"
| Transcription |
I never really understood what the fuss was about Plato, the philosopher. You’d hear everyone say he was one of the best or the best philosopher whoever lived, or you’d hear that quote that all of western philosophy is footnotes to Plato. But when I read him, and I think I understood him, I didn’t get what the big deal was.
That was until one of my professors told me something that made me realize I had been reading Plato all wrong.
You see, Plato wrote dialogues, or that’s what they’re commonly referred to as, but they’re are stories where the characters talk a lot, which is why we call them dialogues. They’re not like how most modern philosophy is done with proposition and syllogisms, Plato wrote stories, that had characters, doing things.
And I always assumed that putting them in the form of stories was just icing on the cake, a really unnecessary shell around the real philosophy.
But then I started listening to Dr. Warren Austin Gage. And Dr. Gage, influenced by the work of Leo Strauss, showed me that the actions in Plato’s Dialogues, the things that the characters do, are just as philosophically important as the words.
For instance, The Republic opens with Socrates going down to the Piraeus, a seaside city. Before, I would have thought that this was inconsequential scene setting. But I realized that this action was an allusion or, more precisely, a foreshadowing of another story later in the Republic, the Allegory of the Cave in Book 10. Socrates tells an allegory where men are chained to the wall in a cave, watching shadows of creatures on the wall, thinking that the shadows are the reality, because that’s all they see. As they are chained to the wall they can’t see that the creatures are real and the shadows are not. This is an image of most people in the world. Most people think that the realities of the world, tables, cars, are the ultimate reality, but for Socrates, they’re not. One man is released to leave the cave and go up to the sunlit earth. There, he sees the reality of the world. He then goes back down into the cave and tells the other men. They don’t believe him and kill him.
Socrates’ action of going down to the Piraeus at the beginning of the The Republic is an allusion to the man going back down into the cave. Plato is communicating by this simple action that the whole book is Socrates coming down to us, the readers, into the cave, bringing the truth of the real sunlit world. And this gives us a choice, will we listen, or kill him. And all this is communicated with one verb, to go down, with one action.
Another great example of the importance and depth of action is in the series The Bodyguard, on Netflix. In the first scene David, an off-duty officer, gets on a train and learns that there is a muslim terrorist onboard who is attempting to bomb it. He finds the man but there is no bomb. He finds instead that his wife, Nadia, has a bomb strapped to her. David tries to calm her and talk her out of blowing up herself and the train.
In an elegantly and ingeniously written sequence the officer who is on duty instructs David to stand down, to move away from Nadia. David, knowing that they will shoot her if he moves away, keeps talking to the her all the while trying to convince the officer take the woman into custody, that is, not kill her. The tension escalates and when David can stall no longer he embraces the muslim woman, guarding her from the sniper who would kill her. He gently rocks back and forth ensuring that the sniper cannot get a good shot.
What is so beautiful about this scene is how the action symbolizes the depth of the redemption. David is contrasted to this woman’s husband. Her husband was willing to sacrifice her while David is willing to sacrifice himself for her.
But there’s more. You see, the action that the writer chooses as the mechanism for saving her life is embrace and gently swaying back and forth, a dance. These are actions that would have been disallowed by this woman’s culture, embracing a man, dancing with him. These are characteristically western actions symbolically in opposition to this woman’s culture. David dances her into a new world, giving her hope, which is the meaning of her name, Nadia...
Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible. And this week we’re talking about some strange and lovely things about Jesus’ birth.
Support the Channel: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart Website: https://www.thebibleisart.com Email: thisdivineart@gmail.com Twitter: @johnbhiggins
| Transcription| Matthew begins his gospel with an expansive, and exhaustive genealogy. Where Jesus is identified with the highest members of the Israelite family. Kings, priests, prophets, and psalmists. And in all this Jesus is this climactic cumulative character encompassing all of humanity in his body. This is the king about whom this gospel will be about.
And in line with this grand backstory Matthew announces to us that he will now give us the story of this King’s birth. But as will become a theme in Matthew’s gospel this opening story does not unfold as we are expecting.
Here’s what the text says, Matthew 1:18–21:
Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.
But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
With Jesus’ pedigree we are expecting a parade. But instead, King Jesus’ birth almost divides a family, causing a divorce. Furthermore, his birth will look like infidelity, adultery. Mary is pregnant without being with a man.
Now why did this climactic king’s birth take place in this strange way? Matthew could have easily left it out and he did not include it just for its drama or to give the story texture. So why did he include it? And why did God design his son’s birth in this manner?
Well first, as we saw in the video about women in Matthew’s genealogy, there is an appearance of infidelity, impurity, but in reality, it is the exact opposite. Mary appears to have been impure, sleeping with another man and becoming pregnant, but in reality she has the purity of soul to accept the savior into her body.
You see, Jesus’ whole ministry will have this same shape. He will constantly be accused of violating the law, of sinning, but in reality he is doing the opposite. He is accused of sin because he is healing on the Sabbath when in reality he was doing what the Sabbath was designed for, the restoration of life.
And this is the same shape of Jesus‘s greatest act. It will appear to be the opposite of what it is. It will appear to be defeat when in reality it is victory.
Second, this strange birth will show us the first example of the different kind of righteousness that Jesus describes. Remember, he will say that we need to have a righteousness that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes and pharisees. But he is not talking about in quantity, just more righteous acts, but in quality. There is a new kind of righteousness that is needed.
Notice, our narrator, for the first time in the Gospel has evaluated a character as righteous. In verse 19 it says, “And Joseph, being a righteous man…” And given how uncommon it is for biblical narrators to give explicit evaluation of characters, why here?
You see, Joseph exemplifies the righteousness of Jesus’ kingdom. In the law, if someone is caught cheating on their spouse, you may bring them to trial and if there is sufficient evidence, they will be killed. That is not to say you have to do this, but you may bring them to trial.
Matthew tells us that “Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.” So Joseph’s righteousness is a generous righteousness. The kind of righteousness that does not want to shame people, but wants to give the benefit of the doubt, that seeks the highest good for them even when there’s massive evidence against them. It’s a justice that doesn’t lay heavy burdens. That wherever there’s a possibility of life and lightness, the burdens are lifted.
So Jesus’ birth is strange because his kingdom is strange and different. It’s not like the kingdoms of this world. In the next chapter there will be another King, Herod, who will also not be what he appears to be but in the opposite direction.
To the world, Jesus appears to be unrighteous, when he is righteous. Herod will appear to be King when his far from it. He will appear to be wise, but be outsmarted by a child, appear to be a protector but in reality a murderer.
The world is upside down, so when the world looks at Jesus’ right-side up kingdom, it looks upside down, strange. And it will take a right-side up king to turn this world around. And that, my friends, is why, the Bible is Art.
In this video we'll look at the cool things the author of Daniel does with bodies and body parts.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart website: https://www.thebibleisart.com email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
Daniel frequently talks about bodies and particular body parts: hair, head, nails, knees, feet, bowels. There are dreams of bodies, bodies thrown in furnaces and lions dens and bodies being resurrected. And the more you read about these bodies the more you realize that the author is trying to do something. He is doing something similar to Plato in the Republic where Socrates is trying to understand justice in a city and to do that he says we must undersand justice in a person, in a soul. Justice in the soul happens when the three parts, the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive, are all in harmony.
But the important part for us is that there’s a connection between the person and the city. You see, Daniel was written to encourage the Israelites who were exiled in a foreign country. So Daniel presents images of two bodies: the good and the evil body. The righteous body and the Worldly body. Daniel unfolds their characters and destinies of these corporate bodies. Is a beautiful literary construction, everytime there is a body or body parts those are putting together an image of the corporate bodies of a righteous and wicked nation. And these two bodies are contrasted providing the Israelites in exile with two options. Let me show you how.
The first picture of a body is Daniel’s body, the good body, in chapter 1. Daniel and his friends refuse to eat the kings’s food but their bodies become strong. Unlike Adam in the garden who ate, Daniel refuses to eat, refusing to receive his life from the Worldly kingdom and becomes stronger for it.
The next body is the Worldly body and we see this in Chapter 2. King Nebuchadnezzar has a dream of a huge body made of four different materials, and the author describes this body from head to toe in seven parts, it’s like the perfect worldly body. And Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar that these four material parts symbolize four successive kingdoms, and that Nebuchadnezzar is the first, he’s head of gold. Now the destiny of this body is that it is smashed to pieces by a stone that’s cut out of a mountain. So the picture is that in contrast to Daniel’s strong body, The Worldy body even though it’s larger and more impressive, is destined for destruction.
In the next chapter, the worldly body continues. Nebuchadnezzar misinterprets the vision and makes a statue of himself, his body, made of gold and requires everyone to bow down to the statue of his body. Notice, he is requiring everyone else’s body to do something, to bow down. And if they don’t, their bodies will be thrown into a firey furnace.
Well, Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meschach, and Abendego, don’t do it and their bodies are thrown into the firey furnace. Then, the narrator tells us that “the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men. The hair of their heads was not singed and their cloaks were not harmed.” Remember this, we are told about their hair and their clothing, we will see this again. The nature of the righteous body is that even it is attacked, God protects it. . It’s interesting that in Isaiah, God describes exile as a firey furnace. So the readers themselves are currently in a firey furnace. In contrast, this worldly body is the kind of body that will burn people alive.
Well, the next chapter opens up with the worldly body again. Nebuchadezzar’s head is hurting from from a bad dream, a dream of a huge tree that’s chopped down. He wants to understand what it means so he ask Daniel and Daniel tells him that he is the tree and that he will cut down because he was so prideful. More that that he will become like an animal. Notice, something will happen to his body. His body will become subhuman. This the character of worldly empires, they aspire to godlike natures but will be cut down, becoming animalistic. In their very attempts to become great, they become less than what they are, transforming into the very opposite. Hitler thought that he was a superior kind of person but ended up acting as the most barbaric and subhuman.
The narrator tells us that Nebuchadezzar does become like an animal and “his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws”. Notice the contrast with the righteous bodies of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego, whose hair, even in fire, was not damaged, while Nebuchadezzar cannot even do the most basic grooming of his.
In this video I look at the fascinating literary technique of moving from a metaphor to reality.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com)
| Transcription |
This week we’re gonna talk about moving from metaphorical things to literal things and from literal things to metaphorical things.
So It’s a common literary technique to use physical things for metaphorical reasons. For instance in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante is on a physical journey from hell to heaven that is meant to be a metaphor for his spiritual journey or in the Bible, Israel’s physical wilderness wanderings for 40 years are meant to be metaphorical of their spiritual wanderings. So you have some physical object or action that happens in a scene or a character and it is also meant to be a metaphor for some non-physical thing: like a character trait or theme. A messy room symbolizing a messy mind of a character.
But you can do the opposite, too. That is where you start with a metaphor and that becomes a physical, literal thing in the story. It’s kind of hard to understand abstractly so let me show you a few examples.
I noticed this in two places in the Bible. First in the gospels when Jesus heals a blind man. The strange thing about this is that nowhere in the Old Testament does it say that the Messiah will heal blind people. In Isaiah 35, when God is talking about all the good things that are going to happen when he comes back and it says that the “eyes of the blind will be opened”, but that seems to be a metaphor. Why? Well, earlier in Isaiah, in chapter 6 when God is judging Israel he says that Isaiah is to “Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” That is, the physical faculties of seeing and hearing are metaphors for moral and spiritual faculties. So later in Isaiah, God says that because Israel is spiritually and morally blind and God will give them spiritual moral eyes, cure their blindness. But when Jesus comes, he unexpectedly opens physically blind eyes. The metaphor of blindness came first, then physical blindness.
Another example of this is with the metaphor of a furnace. In Isaiah 48, God says that the exile is like being in a furnace (48:10). That is, a fiery furnace is a metaphor for physical exile.
But then, in the book of Daniel, when the Israelites are in exile Shadrach, Meschach, and Abendego are literally thrown into a fiery furnace. The metaphor came first, then the literal thing.
So why then this literary technique, what does it do? Well, I’m not sure, at least not sure of every reason. But I do know that it tells you something about the author and something about the text.
First, it shows you the genius the author is capable of. Bach famously wrote a short phrase that represented his name and would sprinkle it throughout his work. This is the phrase.
If you want to learn more about that and the phenomenon of musical cryptograms, you can see a great video linked in the description.
This reverse metaphor technique demonstrates the literary virtuosity of God, the ultimate author, that he can take imaginary things and make them real, make worlds with this mind and then his hands.
You see if you go into a movie or a book is dumb and adolescent, I’m not going to give it careful attention. But if you go in think that it is a work of high genius, you will attend to every detail.
Second, it shows us that the text is a deep and layered thing. That it surprises. And as much as you think you know how it’s going to end or where the plot is going, you don’t. Under every metaphor there might be a real thing.
In this video we explore a two step technique for understanding all biblical genealogies. We also explore the fascinating literary things the author does with Enoch and Lamech in Genesis 4 and 5.
| The Bible is Art | The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
bible #genesis #art #literature
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
John is a literary genius and has arranged Jesus' 7 miracles/signs into a chiasm. John organized Jesus' signs around the feeding of the 5,000 and the bread of life discourse to unfold something central about Jesus.
Divine Symmetries: The Art of Biblical Rhetoric (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076...)
FYI, this is an affiliate link.
| The Bible is Art | The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
bible #genesis #art #literature
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this video I explore the allusion to the creation story in Genesis 1 in the genealogy in Genesis 5.
| The Bible is Art | The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
bible #genesis #art #literature
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this video I look at the art of genealogies in the Bible. More specifically, we'll look at the genealogies in Genesis 4 and 5 and discover how they are not lists of names but artfully designed literature. We look at why the names are similar or identical in the two first genealogies in the Bible.
| The Bible is Art | The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
The Book of Proverbs is often thought to be a collection of wise sayings. While not less than that, it was designed as story of the development, training of a son. Walking through the seven stages from beginning to advanced wisdom, the author of Proverbs composes a skillful and sophisticated story with surprises from beginning to end.
| The Bible is Art | The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
The most common misunderstanding of proverbs is that they are solely simple moral aphorisms. That is the opposite of what they were designed to be and we discuss precisely how they are works of high literary and moral genius.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebibleisart
bible #genesis #art #literature
website: https://www.thebibleisart.com music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
So It’s a common literary technique to use physical things for metaphorical reasons. For instance in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante is on a physical journey from hell to heaven that is meant to be a metaphor for his spiritual journey or in the Bible, Israel’s physical wilderness wanderings for 40 years are meant to be metaphorical of their spiritual wanderings. So you have some physical object or action that happens in a scene or a character and it is also meant to be a metaphor for some non-physical thing: like a character trait or theme. A messy room symbolizing a messy mind of a character.
But you can do the opposite, too. That is where you start with a metaphor and that becomes a physical, literal thing in the story. It’s kind of hard to understand abstractly so let me show you a few examples.
I noticed this in two places in the Bible. First in the gospels when Jesus heals a blind man. The strange thing about this is that nowhere in the Old Testament does it say that the Messiah will heal blind people. In Isaiah 35, when God is talking about all the good things that are going to happen when he comes back and it says that the “eyes of the blind will be opened”, but that seems to be a metaphor. Why? Well, earlier in Isaiah, in chapter 6 when God is judging Israel he says that Isaiah is to “Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” That is, the physical faculties of seeing and hearing are metaphors for moral and spiritual faculties. So later in Isaiah, God says that because Israel is spiritually and morally blind and God will give them spiritual moral eyes, cure their blindness. But when Jesus comes, he unexpectedly opens physically blind eyes. The metaphor of blindness came first, then physical blindness.
Another example of this is with the metaphor of a furnace. In Isaiah 48, God says that the exile is like being in a furnace (48:10). That is, a fiery furnace is a metaphor for physical exile.
But then, in the book of Daniel, when the Israelites are in exile Shadrach, Meschach, and Abendego are literally thrown into a fiery furnace. The metaphor came first, then the literal thing.
So why then this literary technique, what does it do? Well, I’m not sure, at least not sure of every reason. But I do know that it tells you something about the author and something about the text.
First, it shows you the genius the author is capable of. Bach famously wrote a short phrase that represented his name and would sprinkle it throughout his work. This is the phrase.
If you want to learn more about that and the phenomenon of musical cryptograms, you can see a great video linked in the description.
This reverse metaphor technique demonstrates the literary virtuosity of God, the ultimate author, that he can take imaginary things and make them real, make worlds with this mind and then his hands.
You see if you go into a movie or a book is dumb and adolescent, I’m not going to give it careful attention. But if you go in think that it is a work of high genius, you will attend to every detail.
Second, it shows us that the text is a deep and layered thing. That it surprises. And as much as you think you know how it’s going to end or where the plot is going, you don’t. Under every metaphor there might be a real thing.
And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel turned Podcast devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design. music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this video I look at the distinctive features of day #3 of the creation week. We will discover how God's characterization on this day unfolds how he works in other biblical stories including the Abraham narrative and the story of Jesus.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel turned Podcast devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this episode we discover the reason for four Gospels in the narrative spine of the Old Testament.
In this week's episode we look the literary art in Day 2 of the creation week. We explore the characterization of God and how his action on Day 2 is the theme for fascinating variations in the rest of Genesis and Exodus.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art in all its sophistication, elegance, and design.
bible #genesis #art #literature
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this video I look at the literary structure of Genesis Chapter 1 and three reasons for the artistic structure. Hint, it's cool.
The Bible is the greatest work of literary genius. And The Bible is Art is a YouTube Channel devoted to explaining this literary art.
bible #genesis #art #literature
music: Kai Engel, "Coelum" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this video I explore the two main ways biblical authors structure their stories. We look at some fascinating examples in the whole Joseph and Abraham narratives as well as the book of Jonah.
Music: Kai Engel - coelum (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai...).
email: thisdivineart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
bible #genesis
I explore how the author of Genesis introduces tension along with the art of literary overture. And Romeo and Juliet make an appearance.
music: Kai Engel, "Idea" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thebibleisart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this video I look at the symbolism of 10 in the literary structure of genesis, the plagues, and the ten commandments.
email: thebibleisart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
| Transcription | Welcome back to the Bible is art where we look at the literary artistry of the Bible and in this week we are looking at the symbolism in the structure of Genesis.
The biblical authors make heavy use of number symbolism but not in this sort of weird number symbolism of like the books like the Bible code where you know in 2012 Saddam Hussein blabbity blah. No, no, no. They use number symbolism in a similar way to how colour symbolism is used in literature that is it may have its own symbolic nature. So red can symbolize love or lust or passion or white could symbolize purity and sometimes it can allude back to other situations where that color is used.
We're gonna look at the symbolism of the number 10 and we're gonna do this because last week we saw that the book of Genesis is organized into ten sections and there's a symbolic reason for that. But before we understand that we have to look at how the Bible uses the number ten. The first time it uses the symbolism of number ten it's actually the place where it sets up this symbolism is in Genesis chapter one. And in Genesis chapter 1 this symbolic use is subtle it's not as if the author says and God did something ten times. You have to look a little bit more carefully.
In Genesis chapter 1 God creates the heavens and the earth. And it's fascinating to see what specifically about creation our narrator wants to point our attention. He wants to point our attention to the means, how God creates the world. And he creates it by speech, by speaking. 10 times the narrator tells us God said, so God said “let there be light” and God said “let there be an expanse” etc. So in Genesis chapter 1 this symbolic connection is established between the number 10 and creation.
Now you may be thinking that's a sort of slim connection right just counting up 10 verbs and I would agree with you if this were the only time but time and time again the biblical authors will layer on examples of the number 10 symbolism
The next time the number 10 symbolism is used is in the plagues of Egypt. There are, of course, 10 plagues, but the numerical connection is not the only connection. There's a creational connection. If you remember back to Genesis 1, the way that God designs the universe is that he designs it into three parts: heaven, earth/land and sea.
I talk about the symbolism of the structure in Genesis, the purpose for the variation of the genres between narrative and genealogy.
Music: Kai Engel, "Music About Sun and Moon" (https://www.kai-engel.com) email: thebibleisart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this episode we look at the biblical narrators' craft of organizing their stories. In the process we'll look at the art of organization in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
Email: thebibleisart@gmail.com Twitter: @johnbhiggins
To understand literature we must understand how to think in layers. Thankfully, that is how the physical world is structured.
Music: Kai Engel - Idea (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai_Engel). With slight editing to match length of video.
email: thebibleisart@gmail.com twitter: @johnbhiggins
In this introductory episode we look at the nature of genius through the works of Plato's Republic, Caravaggio's painting "Narcissus", and Matthews Gospel.