Monthly Archives: February 2015

David’s mighty men

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

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I posted on the my website yesterday a chart of David’s mighty men, based on 2 Samuel 23 and 1 Chronicles 11. David was Israel’s greatest and paradigmatic king, and a man of many talents. He won worldwide fame for his great victories on the battlefield, which expanded Israel’s borders all the way from Egypt to the Euphrates River.

From the beginning of his reign, David kept a cadre of thirty elite warriors who were known as “The Thirty” or “The Mighty Men.” In modern terms, the Thirty would have been something like the U. S. Navy’s SEAL Team 6. These were the go-to soldiers that David could count on to turn the tide of the fiercest battles. Although both 2 Samuel 23 and 1 Chronicles 11 refer to the Thirty as a unit, 2 Samuel 23:39 states that the total number of mighty men was thirty-seven. This is because there were seven super-elite warriors who outranked the Thirty. One of these seven super-elites was King David, who was a great warrior in his own right but also Commander-in-Chief. Then there were two tiers of three elites, each of which was ranked from greatest to least. One of these two groups of three consisted of what were evidently the three most capable Israelite warriors—Jashobeam, Eleazar, and Shammah. This group of Three was virtually unbeatable on the battlefield. The other group of Three—Joab, Abishai, and Benaiah—consisted of three men who were greater warriors than the Thirty, though not than the other unit of Three. The second tier of Three, however, had exceptional leadership capabilities, and so were given command over the army. The other great warriors were also given leadership positions, since in the days of hand-to-hand combat officers had to be capable of physically leading their men on the battlefield.

Second Samuel 23 lists thirty-one men in the group of Thirty, but with one duplicated from the list of the Three (Shammah the Hararite). First Chronicles 11 also lists more than thirty names, although the first thirty names in both lists are only slightly different. There are many slight differences in the forms of the names, which are easily explained by common copying mistakes; in some cases, men may have taken more than one name or may have been called by slight variations of the same name. The extra sixteen names in the list in 1 Chronicles 11 probably occur because there were different men in the group of Thirty at different times, due to age, death, injury, and so forth.

In addition to the Thirty, David also had two units of personal bodyguards, “the Cherethites” and “the Pelethites,” and by the end of David’s reign there were two new elite warriors, Shimei and Rei (1 Kgs 1:8). The famous group of Thirty itself does not seem to have outlasted David’s own fighting days.

There are a number of interesting names in the list of mighty men. One is Eliam the son of Ahithophel the Gilonite (2 Sam 23:34). Ahithophel, once David’s closest advisor, betrayed him when David’s son Absalom rebelled (2 Sam 15:12; 16:15–17:23). One wonders whether Eliam followed David when his father sided with Absalom. On the one hand, 2 Samuel 16:6 states that the mighty men went with David out of Jerusalem. On the other hand, it would be difficult for Eliam not to side with his father, and it is unlikely that Ahithophel would have proposed leading an army against David’s retinue were his own son in it. Since 1 Chronicles 11:36 names a different man in Eliam’s place, it is probable that Eliam sided with Absalom and was replaced after the rebellion was put down.

It is remarkable that there were a number of Gentiles among David’s mighty men—Zelek the Ammonite, Uriah the Hittite, Igal of Zobah, Ittai the Gittite, and perhaps others. It is evident that David’s deeds on the battlefield had made his God famous, and that David actively sought to convert foreigners to faith in Yahweh, the God of Israel. Missionary activity did exist in the OT period, and this is one example of it.

The description of David’s mighty men and their heroic deeds in 2 Samuel 23 and 1 Chronicles 11 certainly makes for interesting reading. But, more than that, the greatness of these men and their deeds reflect the greatness of the glory of David’s kingdom, which reflects the greatness of the glory of God. The men who fought for David were warriors for God, and their heroic feats were a demonstration of God’s power in exalting His people and the king whom He anointed.

Ur of the Chaldees: Abraham’s original home

13 Friday Feb 2015

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Genesis 11:28-31 identifies Abraham’s original hometown as “Ur of the Chaldees,” or “Ur of the Chaldeans.” Sometime during Abraham’s adult life, probably while he was already about seventy years old, his father Terah moved the family clan to the city of Haran in northern Syria as the first step in a planned migration to the land of Canaan. Terah himself did not complete the journey; he died while the family was living in Haran. When Abraham was seventy-five years old, he received a personal call from God to migrate to Canaan (Gen 12:1-3). This caused a division in the family clan: Abraham’s nephew Lot went with him to Canaan, while the rest of Abraham’s family stayed in the area of Haran, where Abraham’s relatives are found living in later chapters of Genesis.

There are two ancient cities called “Ur” that are known from archaeology. By far the most famous is a city in southeastern Mesopotamia that was a great center of early civilization. A second Ur, which was far less prominent, is called “Ur in Haran” by an ancient tablet from Ebla. Islamic tradition identifies Shanliurfa, which is 24 miles (39 km) northwest of Haran, as Abraham’s original home. This city was refounded in the Hellenistic period as Edessa, and later became the center of the Syriac Christian community.

Although some scholars identify Ur of the Chaldees with the northern city of Ur, the arguments in favor of the southern location are compelling. In Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, he says that Abraham’s original home was in “the land of the Chaldeans” (Acts 7:4), a term which is used by other biblical writers to refer to southern Mesopotamia (e.g., Isa 23:13; Jer 25:12; Ezek 12:13). It seems that the author of Genesis intended to specify the southern location of Ur by identifying it as the one that is in the land of the Chaldeans. Stephen says that Abraham had to leave the land of the Chaldeans in order to travel to Haran (Acts 7:4), whereas the reference to the northern Ur as “Ur in Haran” shows that it already lay within the territory of Haran. Stephen also indicates in Acts 7:2 that what he means by “Mesopotamia”—Abraham’s original home—is a different region than the region around Haran, since he says that Abraham lived in Mesopotamia before he lived in Haran.

Abraham’s relatives are found in later chapters of Genesis to be living near Haran in northern Syria/Aram (now part of Turkey). However, as has already been noted, this does not mean that “Ur of the Chaldees” was in northern Syria, since Genesis 11:31-32 states that Terah had moved Abraham’s extended family to Haran prior to Abraham’s journey to the land of Canaan with Lot (Gen 12:5). Since Arameans dominated the region around Haran, the Bible calls Laban “the Aramean” (Gen 25:20; 31:20, 24), and portrays Laban as a speaker of the Aramaic language in Genesis 31:47. Deuteronomy 26:5 even calls Jacob an “Aramean” because of his twenty years spent with Laban in Paddan-aram (near Haran). But Jacob and Laban could not have been of Aramean descent, since they were descended from Shem’s son Arpachshad (Gen 11:10-26), whereas the Arameans were descended from Shem’s son Aram (Gen 10:22-23).

Some scholars argue that because Abraham seems to be culturally Semitic in the Genesis narratives, he must have been from the northern location of Ur, which was in Aramean territory, and not from the southern location of Ur, which was in Sumerian territory. Several points may be noted against this argument. First, although the southern Ur was in Sumerian territory, it was culturally Hurrian, and the dates of modern secular archeology are divergent enough from the Bible’s chronology so that we cannot be certain which group dominated the city at the time of Abraham. Possibly Ur was already dominated by the Chaldeans (an Aramean tribe) at the time of Abraham. Alternatively, the reference to the Chaldeans could have been made by a later writer (I would argue Ezra) who updated some geographical references in the Pentateuch. Second, Abraham himself was a Semite by birth, and therefore would have retained the culture of his clan, regardless of where he lived. Third, although most of the stories in the Abraham narrative of Genesis occur in a Semitic cultural setting (the Canaanites spoke a Semitic language even though they were not Semites by blood), Abraham and Sarah chose to move to an urban, sophisticated Egyptian culture during a famine, and they evidently had little difficulty living in that culture. Lot, as well, chose to live in the large urban center of Sodom, which seems to indicate that the family was used to life in a big city with a mixed population. When Abraham seems to act like a Bedouin, it may just be that he is conforming to the culture of the land.

Ur in southern Mesopotamia was founded by the Sumerian people. But the earliest Semitic texts in Mesopotamia are also from Ur. The Sumerians called the early Semitic migrants “westerners.” Abraham was evidently part of the huge Semitic minority that lived in the large Sumerian city-state of Ur. Ur had hot and cold running water, a sewer system, multistory buildings, paved roads, major temples, ornate furniture, and a variety of metal instruments. The Sumerians developed a sexagesimal system that divided the hour into 60 minutes, the minute into 60 seconds, and the circle into 360 degrees—a system that we still use today. There were well developed law codes and a standard system of weights and measures. There was a system of canals connecting the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys to control floods and provide irrigation so farming could go on year-round. At the time of Abraham, Ur would have been on or very near the shore of the Persian Gulf, in the Euphrates River delta, though the vast amounts of sediment carried by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have since filled in about 150 miles of the original gulf. There was probably a port on the gulf shore that was alive with trade and fishing boats.

In my job working for BiblePlaces, I have looked at pictures of more than 10,000 ancient artifacts from the collections of museums all over the world. One would think that the artifacts from the most ancient periods would be crude, and the craftsmanship would become finer in later periods. But I would say that the artifacts from Abraham’s Ur are among the most impressive of all. Their craftsmanship is finer, more luxurious, better, than most of what came later.

If Abraham was a wealthy man in Ur, as he appears to have been, he must have possessed many treasures of the finest craftsmanship and the most exquisite materials. He would have lived in a mansion in Ur that would probably still look impressive today. As an upper class, free man, he would have attained a high level of education and must have been literate and fluent in Sumerian, Akkadian, various other Semitic languages (e.g., Amorite, Aramaic), and probably Egyptian as a trade language. He would have enjoyed a refined urban life in a highly advanced center of civilization. To leave all of this in order to journey to Canaan would have meant a huge sacrifice of material comfort for Abraham. Abraham lived in a tent in Canaan, not in a house, and he lived in rugged fields, deserts, and mountains, away from the conveniences of civilization. Whereas Ur had a perpetually dry and sunny climate with a stable water supply from rivers, Canaan had a far messier and more unpredictable climate, with rain, snow, frost, dew, and so forth. The only two centers of advanced civilization near Canaan were Egypt and Sodom, both of which were spiritually problematic and outside of the area where God wanted Abraham to live.

When we read the narrative of the call of Abraham, it is easy to overlook the fact that Abraham gave up a lot of wealth and comfort when he left Ur and went to Canaan. Abraham also gave up the linguistic sophistication of Ur, since his descendants would adopt the language of the land of Canaan (Hebrew), which was not one of the major literary languages of the ancient world (outside of its use by Abraham’s descendants). That Abraham obeyed God’s call to settle his family in the land of Canaan shows that when he was forced to make a choice between God and money, he would choose God. The depth of Abraham’s commitment to God is shown again in Genesis 22, when Abraham chose to obey God even at the cost of his own son Isaac’s life. Abraham was truly a man with a great heart for God.

Is imprisonment as a punishment for a crime biblical?

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

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The United States is probably the world’s greatest proponent of imprisonment as punishment for crimes. For the recent past, the United States has consistently had the highest incarceration rate of any large country in the world. Most of the rest of the world has followed the United States’ example, and prison is the generally accepted method of punishing crime in the world today. It will be shocking to many Americans and Europeans to hear that the whole idea of a prison system does not have biblical support, and there are good reasons to believe that it is unsound.

The Law of Moses sets out what is, without a doubt, the ideal system of criminal justice. It must be the ideal, since the Law was devised directly and entirely by God Himself, as Israel’s King. It is striking, then, that there is no jail in the Law of Moses. Punishment is by physical and financial damages or death. Outside of the Mosaic code, jail is mentioned occasionally in the Old Testament (Gen 39:29–40:23; Jer 37:11-21), which shows that it existed at the time, though there was no jail in Hammurapi’s ancient law code, either. In Numbers 15:34, a man was held in custody pending a verdict, but it was assumed that the verdict would not be that he should remain in jail. So jail did exist at the time of Moses, but only as a place to temporarily hold the accused pending an investigation and trial. Jail finally became the societal norm by the time of the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament, although the Romans used their jail system in combination with other forms of punishment.

Jail is a terrible place that forces otherwise good men to act as criminals, and subjects them to great abuse from other criminals and from guards. It creates a great financial burden on society to care for the prison population. It creates a great social and financial burden for families who lose members of their family to jail. It condemns the incarcerated to a terrible living death. It is well established that in any country that has a prison system, otherwise good people who enter the prison system for minor offenses will often come out of jail as hardened criminals. Many are forced to join gangs, often along racial lines, as a means of surviving in prison. Many are horribly beaten, abused, and even killed; there were 9,000 reported instances of (homo)sexual assault in U. S. prisons in 2011 alone, and many more that were not reported. In America, about 70 percent of prisoners are rearrested within three years of their release. Society, meanwhile, loses the services of people who otherwise could be doing productive labor, and instead has to pay to take care of them. The idea of jail as punishment for crime ultimately comes from the Greco-Roman classical world—and, more recently, from England—not from the Bible.

(As an application, the Bible never recommends jail as discipline for children. The Bible recommends rebuke and non-injurious corporeal punishment for the discipline of children [cf. Prov 13:24; 19:18; 23:13-14; 29:15, 17]. The idea that it is better for parents to send children to their rooms than it is to spank them does not come from the Bible, although the Bible does not forbid parents from sending children to their rooms. In my own experience, adults who are the best disciplined and best behaved are the ones who were disciplined physically as children, not the ones who were grounded and sent to their rooms.)

One of the fundamental flaws of the jail system (and also of extrabiblical ancient Near Eastern law codes, such as Hammurapi’s) is that it lacks a sense of punishment in proportion to the crime. Under the Mosaic Law, a thief had to make restitution for the thing which he stole, adding 20 percent to its value (Lev 6:4-5). If a man dug a pit and failed to cover it, and another man’s ox fell into the pit and died, the man who dug the pit was given the dead ox, but had to pay the price of the ox to the ox’s owner (Exod 21:33-34). The overall principle of justice in the Mosaic Law was equal recompense: eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life (Exod 21:23-25). The punishment was to be exactly equal to the crime committed—no more, and no less. A murderer was to be put to death (Num 35:17). A man who knocked out his neighbor’s tooth was to have his own tooth knocked out (Lev 24:19). A false witness was to be given the sentence that would have been given to the man whom he falsely accused (Deut 19:16-19). In certain cases the judges could prescribe a limited number of lashes as punishment for unspecified crimes (Deut 25:1-3). Various other punishments are prescribed in the Mosaic Law for specific offenses, but always with the aim of equal recompense and preserving the moral fabric of society. This is a great contrast to the modern American legal system, in which often light sentences are given for serious crimes, while some minor offenses result in a long jail sentence and a heavy fine. Little or no concern is given to how the sentence might negatively impact the guilty person, his family, or all of society. The perfectly equal nature of the criminal justice system set out in the biblical Torah led Moses to boast, “What great nation is there, that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law, which I set before you today?” (Deut 4:8).

There are several other errors in the reasoning behind the prison system. One is the idea that all punishment that causes sensory pain is evil, whereas imprisonment is compassionate because it does not cause sensory pain (the same idea behind the movement to ban the spanking of children). However, I guarantee you that if you asked people who were being sentenced for a crime to choose between twenty years in prison or forty lashes, most of them would choose the forty lashes. They might be sore for a while, but they would still be free and able to work and to be at home with family. This shows that prison is actually a far more terrible punishment than lashes. God Himself often afflicts His people with physical problems in order to teach them lessons, and certainly God is not unjust. Even within the prison system, it is unfortunate that prisoners are punished for misbehavior by being placed in solitary confinement, rather than by being punished physically. Studies have repeatedly shown that solitary confinement creates mental and physical problems that are far more serious than the temporary, superficial injuries caused by appropriately administered physical punishments.

Many people today hold the mistaken notion that the purpose of the criminal justice system is not actually to inflict punishment on criminals, but is rather to isolate dangerous people from the rest of society and to rehabilitate them. The Bible, however, teaches that retribution is the basic purpose of the punishments inflicted by a criminal justice system (Rom 13:4). Another purpose of the criminal justice system is to restrain sin, whether by punishing people who commit crimes, or by others hearing of this punishment and being afraid to commit the same trespass. The ultimate deterrent to crime is capital punishment (cf. Deut 13:5, 11; 17:7, 12-13; 19:19-20; 21:21; 22:21-24; 24:7). Under the Mosaic Law, people who were so thoroughly wicked that they had to be removed from society—such as sorcerers (Exod 22:18), apostates (Deut 13:1-18), and uncontrollable rebellious teenagers (Deut 21:18-21)—were to be executed, rather than locked up in prison.

If people are in jail, they should have to work (or at least be given the opportunity to work), so as to make them productive contributors to society. But the American model is generally for the prisoners to be cared for at the public expense. Prisoners in America are given free meals, free medical, dental, and vision care, free clothes, free housing, 24/7 protection, and so forth—benefits that poor, hardworking people do not receive. Some of the worst criminals receive these benefits for decades, and the financial cost to society is enormous. According to a New York Times study, the city of New York’s annual cost per inmate was $167,731 in 2012. Nationwide, the average annual cost per inmate is a little more than $30,000. The moral cost to the prisoners themselves and to their families is even more devastating. Prison is an unbiblical idea that society truly cannot afford.