The Secret Artistry Hidden in Every Hebrew Word with Dr. Gary Rendsburg

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have a very special guest. We've got Dr. Gary Rendsburg with us, and we're going to be talking some Hebrew text today, Dr. Rendsburg.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Let's do it. Thanks for having me on.

Johnny Ova: I really appreciate the time, and I know our audience is going to be blessed listening in to our conversation. It's something we've been chatting about a lot, so I figured I had to bring in the big guns.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: The big guns are all right behind me on my bookcase. Go ahead.

Johnny Ova: Perfect. Let's start with something high level. When someone opens an English Bible and reads a chapter in Genesis or Samuel, what are they actually missing that a reader of the original Hebrew would catch instantly?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: It's a wonderful question. Let's set the stage by reminding listeners that when we read in English, we are reading a translation. For the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish Bible or Old Testament, the original is in Hebrew, and for the New Testament the original is in Greek. I'm mainly a Hebrew scholar, so we'll focus on that material. We are reading it through what we call the veil of a translation. I don't remember who said it, or if it's attributed to anybody, but reading the Bible in translation is like kissing the bride through the veil. Sorry to be a little sexist there, with our twenty-first-century sensibilities, but I hope listeners get the idea that there's a barrier between us reading the text in English and the original, written about three thousand years ago, at least the older parts of the Bible.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: You don't have to read far in the Bible. The first two words are already the best illustration. Listen carefully as I say them in Hebrew: bereshit bara. They both start with the B and R sounds. Those are the Hebrew letters bet and resh, and both words have as their third letter the letter aleph, so the first two words of the Bible begin with the same three-letter string. The first word, bereshit, means "in the beginning." In Hebrew that's a single word. The second word is bara, which means "he created." In Hebrew the verb typically comes before the subject, so the next word is God, Elohim. Bereshit bara Elohim: in the beginning God created.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: That verb to create is used throughout the first creation account, Genesis 1, spilling over into Genesis 2. It's actually a unique verb in the Bible, because it's only used with God as the subject. If a human creates something, say a potter making a pot, a different verb is used, and there's a series of verbs for different actions: to make a pot, to build something, whatever. But bara is used only when God is the subject. My point, to get to your question, is that in English you read, in the beginning God created, or in Hebrew word order, in the beginning created God the heavens and the earth. You don't hear the first two words echoing each other, because "in the beginning" and "created" don't sound alike in English. But in Hebrew, bereshit bara, you'd hear it. And the person reading the text would see the word "create" in the first three letters, even though those letters are part of the word "in the beginning."

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: That's just the phenomenon of reading Hebrew in the ancient world. The writers of the Bible delighted in this kind of wordplay, sound play, at times double meaning, and so on. That requires a highly sophisticated audience who understood the small bits and pieces, what I call the building blocks of ancient Hebrew literature, and they would have caught all of it. Somewhat like when, if you're educated enough, you go see a Shakespeare play and catch all those wonderful evocations of the English language Shakespeare created in his day. I hope that first example is a beautiful way to start our conversation.

Johnny Ova: It's a great way to start. Again, the Bible's not written in English. We're reading a translation. If you stuck even modern Spanish in front of a lot of people who don't speak Spanish and said, translate this, they'd have a very hard time understanding the full meaning and depth. And if you listen to the conversation, not just read the words, you get an added depth too. You've spent your career arguing that the Hebrew Bible is not just a religious message but a work of deliberate literary genius. When did that first hit you, and what convinced you the craft was intentional rather than accidental?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Let's start with an admission. We all have our little admissions to make. I was an English major as an undergraduate. I just mentioned Shakespeare, and in fact as an undergraduate I read mainly Middle English, Chaucer and others, and early modern or Renaissance English, Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I thought I'd go off and do a PhD in English, but I was taking Hebrew all the time as an undergraduate, and by my senior year of college I shifted into Hebrew studies. I went on to my PhD at New York University in Hebrew studies, and I've never looked back. That's all I've ever done. But I've never lost my love of reading a text literarily, which is what you learn as an English major, just as a music major learns to analyze a symphony or a film major learns to analyze a film. We're all analyzing the creativity of the creators of these exquisite texts or compositions. So from the very beginning of my career, this is basically what I've been doing.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: I also have to say that the literary approach to the Bible, which I use in my teaching and writing, was not always present. Throughout most of the twentieth century, scholars in biblical studies tended to operate as historians. They asked questions like: where is Abraham's Ur? When did Abraham live? Under which pharaoh did Joseph serve? Under which pharaoh did the Exodus happen? Listeners may know that in Genesis and Exodus we don't get the names of pharaohs. It's simply Pharaoh, or king of Egypt. Other questions were, what was the extent of the empire of David and Solomon? How many Israelites left Egypt? Those were the questions people asked, including my teachers, in the twentieth century.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Then around 1980 the field took a new turn with the literary interpretation of the Bible. We have to give a lot of credit to Robert Alter, my retired colleague at UC Berkeley, who is still alive and well at ninety and still producing great scholarship. God bless him indeed. His pathfinding 1982 book, The Art of Biblical Narrative, changed the field, and a couple of years later came The Art of Biblical Poetry. There were other scholars as well, including Meir Sternberg of Tel Aviv University and Jan Fokkelman of Leiden University in the Netherlands, and they started reading the Bible through literary eyes. Of course I jumped on that bandwagon and rode that wave, because I'd been trained to read texts literarily as an English major, and it's a very transferable skill. Whether you're reading Chaucer or Genesis, you know how to analyze a text.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Now let's also state this. Philosophy, religious philosophy and theological treatises don't exist in the ancient Near East. We have philosophy from Greece, but that doesn't really come until the fifth century, a little before that with the pre-Socratics, and then Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century. And those Greek philosophers aren't really doing theology. We don't get theologies of Judaism until the first century, with some bits before that, and we don't get Christian theology until the third or fourth century with the early church fathers, the most famous of whom is St. Augustine. So how did anybody in the ancient world, a Babylonian, an Egyptian, an Israelite, learn the traditions of their religion and culture? The only outlet was storytelling.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: As one of my colleagues likes to say, it's a great expression: Torah as story. It is first and foremost a literary text, and from that you extract the theology. Nobody sat down and opened a treatise like St. Augustine's or one by a medieval Jewish philosopher like Maimonides to learn what it means to be an ancient Israelite and what they're supposed to believe. There are no such treatises. All you have is the text and the stories in the Pentateuch and the following books. And you don't want to tell a boring story, no one's going to read it. You tell it with verve and aplomb, and that is exactly what the authors of Genesis, Exodus and so on were able to accomplish, and their readership no doubt appreciated it.

Johnny Ova: When they were telling these stories, as you're saying, how do we express what we believe, were they telling them to express what they believed to be true, or just to tell stories, to shape the actions of their culture and pass them on? Did they believe this actually happened, and then ask how to express it in a story?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: No, I think they actually believed it. Look, let's bracket the first eleven chapters of Genesis. From Abraham onward, let's say there's a historical kernel to it. Do I personally believe in the splitting of the sea, and that six hundred thousand adult males left Egypt on a single night? The answer is no. So you have what's called an epic overlay on a historical kernel, because that's the way storytelling works. It's a little like American mythology. George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and not being able to lie, and something about a silver dollar tossed across the Potomac, all those stories we tell. They built up pretty early, soon after Washington's death, I think in the first biography of him. That doesn't mean he isn't a historical figure, and of course we still honor him the way we do in the United States.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: So yes, they certainly believed that God spoke to these individuals, Abraham, Moses and later the prophets. Did they believe all of Genesis 1 through 11 in the same way? I don't know. They may have seen the flood story as a good narrative. Did they see Noah and the flood as historical in the same way as King David? I don't know. But we can bracket those eleven chapters.

Johnny Ova: You make the case that these texts were written to be heard out loud, not read silently. How does that one shift change how we should understand them? I mentioned this a little before, but I'd love for you to explain it.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: First, let's explain how we know that. This is true not just of the Bible but of everything in the ancient world, and in fact the medieval world. There is no silent reading in the ancient world. One person held the written text. It was certainly written. In the biblical period it would have been on a papyrus scroll. Later on, Jews started using parchment scrolls made from animal skins, and that continued through the Middle Ages until the age of printing. Gutenberg's first printing of the Latin Bible was done on both parchment and paper. You could buy the more expensive parchment or the less expensive paper. Today, of course, we use almost entirely paper.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Before that there was no mass media. Gutenberg is the first mass media, when you can produce as many copies as you like on a printing press. You can run off five hundred or a thousand, and eventually in the twentieth century print runs reach into the millions. Gary and Johnny can have the same copy of the same exact text. That doesn't exist before printing. Everything had to be produced by hand, what we call a manuscript, meaning written by hand, by a professionally trained scribe. We know there were written texts. We have papyrus scrolls from Egypt, Egyptian hieroglyphic texts found in tombs, and great Egyptian literature from them. We don't have any papyrus scrolls from ancient Israel, because the climate hasn't preserved them, except for a few tiny fragments of administrative texts found near the Dead Sea, more like invoices and receipts, not literature.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: So somebody would have read the text aloud, or maybe known it by heart, and everybody else listened. It's not like everybody could get a copy. It's not like I'm in class today and can hand out thirty copies to my thirty students and project it on the screen at the same time. You just had to listen. So what we picture in the ancient world is a performer or presenter reading aloud, somewhat like a stage actor, with all the emphases and pregnant pauses needed to bring the words on the page alive to a listening audience. How do we know this? First, we can deduce it, because there just weren't copies. Not everybody could have a Bible in their house.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: We can also deduce it this way. If you take Hebrew 101, you learn the basic verb qara, which means two things: to call, as in to call aloud, and to read. That tells you reading was done aloud. That same verb qara is the one you hear in the Arabic word Qur'an. The Muslim and Jewish traditions are aligned on this. When we say "scripture," which Christians typically use, the root meaning from Latin is something written. But in Hebrew we say Miqra, and in Arabic Qur'an, for the scriptures, and those mean not things written, though they are, but things recited, read aloud. So a better translation of Qur'an is "the recitation." That's true of the Hebrew tradition going back almost two millennia before Islam. That's how texts worked.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: There's also a great passage from which we can deduce this, in Isaiah 29. The prophets frequently talk about a world in which everything will be turned upside down in the age to come, a topsy-turvy world, for lack of a better term. In Isaiah 29 he says Lebanon will become like Carmel. Lebanon's very high mountains, where you don't grow much, will become like Carmel in northern Israel, which has vineyards on its slopes. And he goes on: the blind will see, the humble will be joyful, the poor will rejoice, the tyrant will come to an end. These are all the reversals. In the middle of all that, in verse 18, which I skipped, he says, and on that day the deaf shall hear the words of the book.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: In our tradition of reading English, the people kept out of the reading process are the blind, who need special help through Braille. The deaf can read, because we read silently. A deaf person can pick up a book and read it perfectly. In ancient Israel, the blind could read, which is to say, be part of an audience listening. The deaf could not. The deaf could not hear the words of the book. That's our proof text for knowing these texts were presented and performed orally. To get back to your question, what that does is bring the text alive. It's a living text. Hopefully it's a living text for Jews and Christians regardless, but when you read it silently, it's not as alive as when you read it aloud. This was a living text for the community of ancient Israel.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: I mentioned a stage production, but a better analogy might be a poetry reading. We still have poetry readings today, and the audience isn't holding the text at their seats. You're listening, using your ears. So we have what I call the oral and aural reading process. It's hard to make that distinction in speech: oral from the mouth, aural into the ear, and not words on a page that you're scanning with your eyes.

Johnny Ova: In the Hebrew text specifically, are there symbols or signs in the way it's written, so someone reading the ancient text aloud would know how to read it? Like in a poetry reading, if I'm being dramatic and exhausting all my energy, we have little notes where you're straining as you talk and showing emotion, or where I have to be quiet, sad and somber. Are there things in the text that signal that?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Another great question. The basic answer is no, but we have to qualify it. The ancient Hebrew text is written in a twenty-two-letter alphabet, and they're all consonants. There are no vowels, no punctuation, no accent marks, no question marks or exclamation points, all the things we take for granted. The only paratextual material is the occasional white space telling you to pause, like our modern paragraphing, where there's a little white space and you go down to the next line. That's all you have in the ancient manuscripts, and that's still the case today in Torah scrolls used in synagogues.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: But alongside the written text was what we call the oral reading tradition. There were people who knew how to read the text aloud with all the intonations, including the vowels and where to pause, even though none of that was written. That oral reading tradition was passed down for at least a thousand years, probably more, depending on which biblical book we're talking about, until the Middle Ages. In the ninth century a group of Jewish scholars created a system for writing the vowels, punctuation, accent marks and so on. That's still used today, twelve hundred years later, in printed Bibles, but not in the Torah scrolls read in the synagogue. So the person reading in the synagogue has to know the oral reading tradition. It's still a living tradition, as we say in Hebrew, ad hayom hazeh, down to the present day.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting. The biblical authors seem obsessed with names. How do they use the meaning and sound of a character's name to tell us something we might overlook, especially if it's never read out loud?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Especially in the early stories, in Genesis above all, when characters are named there's usually some kind of play on the name. Take Isaac. In Hebrew, Yitzhak means "he laughs." So the idea of laughter is woven throughout the Abraham story, especially with Sarah laughing, and if I recall Abraham laughs as well. Sarah laughs when God tells her she'll give birth at an advanced age, and that's how the son comes to be named Isaac. Jacob, depending on how you trace the word, is clearly connected to the word "heel." Jacob is grabbing Esau's heel when the twins are born, Esau first and Jacob second. That's a good example where you have to suspend disbelief, by the way, because a twin wouldn't come out hand first. That would be a very difficult breech birth for the mother.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Most famously there's Moses. There's still a big debate about what the Hebrew name Moshe means, but the explanation in Exodus 2 comes from the Egyptian princess who names him: because I drew him out of the water. There's a rare Hebrew verb, mashah, meaning to draw out of water. It's not the common word, but she uses it there. Of course that raises issues, because she's an Egyptian and wouldn't be speaking Hebrew, and the name may not be Hebrew at all. It may be Egyptian. There's a debate about that. For listeners, it's the same element you hear at the end of various pharaohs' names, like Thutmose and Ramesses, meaning child of Thoth and child of Ra. With Moses, no Egyptian deity, or even the God of Israel, is named. It's simply Moses. I'm not sure that's the actual origin, but there's certainly an evocation of it there. All of those things are happening in the Bible, and again, it's a way to bring the text alive.

Johnny Ova: Alliteration and sound patterns also run through these texts. Why would inspired, revered Scripture be packed with what almost look like poetry tricks? What were the authors trying to accomplish?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: It's the same thing I said a moment ago. You want to grab the audience and pull them in from the start with all these sound plays. We have another great American analogy. The greatest piece of American oratory is the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln begins, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent." Why make us do arithmetic at the beginning? Why not just say eighty-seven? Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth. You hear the four, the fathers, the forth. On this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty: continent and conceived share the same first syllable. I don't think the alliteration continues through the whole relatively short address, but picture yourself at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery with Lincoln standing there. You're drawn into the speech right from the get-go. That's what the biblical writers are doing. They're drawing you in with sound play, alliteration and so on.

Johnny Ova: You've shown that the writers sometimes had characters speak in broken, confused or foreign-sounding Hebrew on purpose. What's going on there, and what does it reveal about how sophisticated these authors were?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: This is a good example of something you may not see in an English translation. Everybody knows the story of Joseph, when his brothers sell him as a slave in Genesis 37. They throw him in the pit before they sell him. Reuben, Jacob's oldest son, goes back to the pit intending to save him from his brothers and pull him out. He gets there and sees the pit is empty, because the other brothers have already sold Joseph, who has been pulled out by the Midianite traders to be taken to Egypt. And Reuben says, in broken Hebrew, "and I, to where shall I come?" In every language in the world, including Hebrew and English, you can't say "to where shall I come." You can say "to where shall I go" or "from where have I come," but you can't put "to where" with the verb "come."

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: So this is a confused mind, a bewildered mind. He has no idea what he's going to do, because his father Jacob is going to blame him, the oldest son, for the loss of Joseph. He even repeats the word "I." In Hebrew it's va'ani anah ani ba. You can hear a little of the alliteration there. And I, to where shall I come? It's a confused sentence. Eleven other times in the Bible, the interrogative "to where" goes with the verb "to go," as you'd expect. This is the only time it's used with the verb "to come." You're entering Reuben's mind. This is a person who can't even form a coherent sentence because of what he sees in the empty pit. That's a great example. Again, it makes it a living text. It makes it a human text.

Johnny Ova: You're the scholar who essentially mapped Israelian Hebrew, a northern dialect hiding inside the text. How did you find it, and how do you know certain passages were written in a different Hebrew than the rest?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: This may go back to my early years studying English literature. Today we have a more or less standardized English, the London dialect or the dialect of southern England, and in the US it's roughly the dialect across the North into the Midwest. But all languages have regional dialects. In the Middle English period we can tell where a text was written. Chaucer is writing in the London dialect, living in London, but we can tell if a text was written in Yorkshire in the north or in the West Country because of the different dialects, spellings and words used. In an American context, most things are written in what I'd call standard northern English, until you get to Faulkner and realize this is a southern writer, creating that Mississippi world so wonderfully in his novels.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: You can see this in the Bible. The best place to start is the book of Kings. When Solomon died, the kingdom split in two: the kingdom of Judah in the south, with its capital in Jerusalem, ruled by the descendants of David and Solomon for the next four hundred or so years, and the kingdom of Israel in the north, with its capital first in Shechem and then Samaria. The book of Kings goes back and forth between the history of the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah. The history of the kings of Judah is told in what we call standard biblical Hebrew, because the Bible as a whole comes to us from Judah, and Jerusalem in particular. All the prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah are from Jerusalem or nearby. But when you read about the northern kings, or prophets like Elijah and Elisha who lived in the northern kingdom, you find a different dialect built into it.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: As for how I came across it, I just started noticing it while reading these stories, and going back to the book of Judges, where many of the judges are in the north. You have to know the land, where the mountains and valleys are when they're mentioned, in the story of Deborah, for example. I kept seeing the same dialect features, or let me say non-standard Hebrew features. Then I realized they're northern Hebrew features, because many of them show up in Phoenician and Aramaic, the two languages spoken north of Israel. Phoenician is really a dialect of Canaanite along with Hebrew, and Aramaic is a different language.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: An analogy, if you study linguistics, which I also did: Dutch and German are separate languages, but along the Dutch-German border, Dutch farmers on one side can talk to German farmers on the other without a problem, because their dialects come close and merge. Same with France and Italy. A person from Rome couldn't talk to a person from Paris without learning the other language. But in the Alps, with the French Alps on one side of the border and the Italian Alps on the other, the villagers can talk to each other because their dialects have moved closer and closer together. Similarly in ancient Israel, there was simply a different dialect in the north. You and I can understand someone from Texas or Alabama, but we know they're from Texas or Alabama because we hear it in their speech. This even shows up in the New Testament, when somebody says to Peter, I know you're from Galilee, because they could hear it in his speech.

Johnny Ova: Wow. That's interesting, that you can read those texts and start picking up these patterns.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: That's what I've done, and you're right. I'm mostly associated with this idea of regional dialects in Hebrew.

Johnny Ova: Over everything you've uncovered over the decades, give me one example of something that dropped you to the floor, that stopped you in your tracks, something hiding in the language that you really have to dig deep for. Does anything pop into your head?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: We can segue into a related topic. This is what comes to mind immediately. In addition to the different dialects, there's this phenomenon: when stories take place in a foreign land, and I'll give you two examples from Genesis, it's still written in Hebrew, but the Hebrew becomes infused with the language of that other land. The best examples are the two stories in Genesis set in the land of Aram. In Genesis 24, Abraham sends his servant to Aram to get a bride for Isaac. It's a wonderful narrative. He finds Rebekah at the well, brings her back, and she agrees to marry Isaac. Five or six chapters later, in Genesis 29, 30 and 31, Jacob goes to live in Aram with his uncle Laban, Rebekah's brother. In those two stories, one a single chapter and the other three chapters, it's still Hebrew, but now infused with Aramaic words, on the assumption that the Hebrew reader would catch the Aramaic.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: A modern analogy, a film analogy. The film is in English but set in Paris. Pick a film. When they wake up in the morning they say bonjour, and when they go out to eat they say bonsoir, and they're having a croissant and a baguette, with a French inflection. If the movie were in French, you'd need subtitles. But it's in English, and they'll say monsieur or whatever, on the assumption that an English speaker knows those basic French words. It transports you to Paris, not just through the scenery but through a little bit of the language here and there. Or those famous World War II movies where the Germans speak perfect English until you get the occasional "Achtung" or "mein Kommandant." It gives you the flavor. So here the biblical writer transports you to the land of Aram through the content of the story and through the narrative style too. Back to what I said: it makes it a living text.

Johnny Ova: Awesome. You've handled medieval Hebrew manuscripts firsthand, including material from the Cairo Geniza. What does sitting with the actual physical text teach you that you can't get from a printed Bible?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: It transports you back to a time before printing, when an actual scribe wrote it, at a date and a place. We know the names of scribes, not so much from the Cairo Geniza material, but certainly from major Hebrew manuscripts written in Spain or Italy or England, or Egypt as well. I've handled manuscripts from all of these places in the major libraries of the world: the National Library of Israel, the Vatican Library, the big three in England, the Bodleian, the British Library and Cambridge University Library, and in the United States the Library of Congress and other places. You're transported to a time when, again, this is a living text. Some scribe wrote this. Some Jewish community was using it. And when printing took over in the early modern period, some collectors had the foresight not to throw these manuscripts away, because they're so precious.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: They're unique, single copies. The text isn't unique, since I work on Bible manuscripts, but the number of words on a page, the formatting and the layout are. Go back to the age of printing: Gary and Johnny pull out The Lord of the Rings, we have the same printed edition, I say turn to page eighty-seven, and we read the same words on the same page, assuming the same printing. Every Bible manuscript will have the same words, but how many words are on a page, how the white space works, whether there are marginal notes, whether someone wrote something in the margin, and whether that was the original scribe, the owner, or someone a century later when it was passed down or sold to another family, all of that differs. We have ownership notes. And I didn't even mention the physical, the tactile and the smell. They still smell, so often of the animal hide.

Johnny Ova: That's incredible. I mean, that is incredible.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: And it's a rarefied world. There are only a couple of hundred of us at most who work on medieval Hebrew manuscripts.

Johnny Ova: It's so fascinating, and this is why I want to have shows like this. People don't even know this stuff. I've got a couple more questions before we wrap, and this has been awesome. Your work on the Exodus argues the narrative carries authentic Egyptian fingerprints. What are those details, and why do they matter for how seriously we take the text as ancient and rooted in the real world?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: We can talk about two things with the Exodus story. One is the historical side, which is a whole other conversation. Based on your question, my answer is the literary and theological side. I believe there is a historical kernel to the Exodus. There's certainly sufficient evidence that the Israelites were in Egypt, and plenty of Egyptological evidence for Semitic peoples coming into Egypt, serving as laborers and leaving Egypt. Not about Israel itself, although Israel is mentioned on one very famous monument. But more important for our conversation is the literary and theological side. The biblical writer of the Exodus narrative, chapters 1 through 15, is at every turn undermining or subverting Egyptian theology.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: The best example is the repeated statement, six times, that Pharaoh's heart was heavy. Either the simple statement, Pharaoh's heart was heavy, or God made Pharaoh's heart heavy. What's that about? The most important ancient Egyptian text from exactly that period, the New Kingdom, is the funerary text called the Book of the Dead. Every major museum has at least one copy. The Met owns two, the Brooklyn Museum has two, the British Museum has several. There's a scene where, to pass from this life into the afterlife, which the Egyptians very much believed in, you go through a ritual called the weighing of the heart. There are pictures of it. Your heart is put on a scale against a feather, the feather of truth. If your heart was light, meaning truthful, it balanced against the feather, and you were escorted by the god Horus before Osiris, the god of the afterlife.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: But if your heart is heavy, the scale tips down. You don't get into the afterlife, and your heart is now on the ground, where it's devoured by a creature called the Devourer, part hippo, part boar, part crocodile, a kind of composite creature. That means you don't get into the afterlife. And if the pharaoh doesn't get into the afterlife, Egypt descends into chaos. The temples are no longer sponsored by the pharaoh, and all of Egypt breaks down. So when the biblical story says that Pharaoh's heart was heavy, the people who are listening to this would have understood that this was directed at the core theology of ancient Egypt. It's fascinating, and there are many other examples of that in the Exodus narrative.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. Lastly, for the pastor or teacher in our audience who will never learn Hebrew, how much of this artistry can they actually recover, and where can they start looking?

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: First of all, don't say they'll never learn Hebrew. There's the story of the ninety-five-year-old woman learning Hebrew, and when they asked her why, she said, when I get to heaven I want to be able to speak to God in his language. How's that for a lesson? I mentioned Robert Alter's book, The Art of Biblical Narrative. It's a slender volume packed with great information, an easy read. I'd suggest starting there. It's gone to a second edition, I think in 2014, after the original 1982 edition. I highly recommend it. And with apologies for the self-promotion, a much bigger volume is my own book, How the Bible Is Written, published in 2019 by Hendrickson, an academic publisher of biblical studies in Peabody, Massachusetts. Every Hebrew word or phrase appears in Hebrew script, transliteration and translation. So when I talk about bereshit bara, in the beginning he created, you'll see the phrase, and even if you can't read Hebrew you can make out that the letters are the same. You'll see it transliterated as I just said it, in our alphabet, and then translated. I go through everything you and I have talked about: the literary devices, the orality, the wordplay, the confused language, the Reuben example. It's all there.

Johnny Ova: That's awesome. I'll make sure I link that book in the description on YouTube, Apple and Spotify. Dr. Rendsburg, I can't thank you enough for your time today. I learned so much and truly enjoyed our time, and hopefully sometime in the future we can do this again.

Dr. Gary Rendsburg: Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me.