What Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria Taught Israel w/ Dr. Christopher Hays

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today our guest is Dr. Chris Hays. Dr. Hays, thank you so much for your time today.

Dr. Christopher Hays: Thanks. It's great to be here with you, Johnny.

Johnny Ova: It's an honor and a privilege for sure. Here's our first question. You've said the Old Testament is an ancient Near Eastern text. For somebody hearing that for the first time, what does it actually mean, and why does it matter for how we read Scripture?

Dr. Christopher Hays: Sure, thanks. I'd say this is one of my uncontroversial claims. The Old Testament is a set of books and texts written from roughly the tenth century through the third century BC, with a few texts off the edges of that range. That's the period up to the conquest of Alexander the Great in the 330s, in the part of the world we call the ancient Near East. So it's a set of texts written in the same period, in languages related to ones in wide use in neighboring nations, using similar scribal practices, and in some cases showing theologies and worldviews that were somewhat common and shared among those nations. When we study the Bible alongside these other texts, it takes on a new life. We can talk about various case studies as we go along. But it's all part of one world. I sometimes say, imagine wanting to study eighteenth-century French literature without knowing a thing about Europe in the same period. How would you understand what the French writers were doing if you didn't have a sense of the wider world they were writing into and for?

Johnny Ova: That makes a ton of sense. Something I talk about a lot is the lens we view things through. We all bring our lens, our culture and our bias into the situation in the first place. You're right: if you don't know the history, the culture and the background, the words are different and the phrases are different. How would you even understand the life they lived? It's so true. Your book, Hidden Riches, walks through side-by-side comparisons between ancient Near Eastern texts and the Hebrew Bible. When you first started doing this kind of comparative work, what was the discovery that really shook you and blew your mind?

Dr. Christopher Hays: It's a bit of a funny story, because I was already well into my graduate education when this took off for me as a passion. Seminary was a three-year master's, and in the third and final year I had a couple of courses at Princeton Seminary with Jim Roberts, who was one of my key teachers. I took both his course on Isaiah and his course on ancient Near Eastern backgrounds to the Old Testament, and doing the two together at the same time truly was mind-blowing. I'd already had the basic introduction to some ancient Near Eastern texts you get in an intro to Old Testament class, but to sit down week after week with the two side by side and read them in detail was so striking. There were all these parallels I hadn't known before. I'd done a lot of literature, read lots of poetry and novels, so I knew how to read a text, but I had never known about this whole world behind the Old Testament. It shed a lot of light.

Dr. Christopher Hays: Probably the key example that, as you say, blew my mind is a genre of Mesopotamian prayers called the dingirshadibba incantations. It's a Sumerian phrase, and it means calming the heart of an angry god. These prayers sounded so much like the Psalms. It was so striking: people saying, I'm a sinner from my birth, and all the things you hear people praying in the Bible as well. I happened to have teachers who could point these things out to me, and these texts were written in almost the same time period. So you have to ask yourself what it means that there are certain commonalities, not exactly the same, in the language of prayer that people used all over the world in the first millennium BC. It shows that there is something in common between our own faith background and other faiths.

Johnny Ova: What drew you to this study? Did you just wake up one day and say, you know what I want to do today? I want to study ancient texts.

Dr. Christopher Hays: That's a great question. I went into seminary with a nominally open mind. I have a lot of academia in my background, but I also have pastors in my background, people working in the church whom I admired. I had a sense that I liked to read, study and teach about these things, so by that third year I figured I'd probably go on to do a PhD. I had a conversation on a stairway once with Patrick Miller, another of the faculty who most inspired me, and he said, Chris, you are going to do a PhD, right? And I said, well, if you're asking, then yes. I had fantastic teachers I was in awe of as a student, and I wanted to be like them. My father is even in the field.

Dr. Christopher Hays: As for why the ancient Near East, I think I'd had a kind of Saul-on-the-road, blinding vision that there's so much more out there. I'm a curious person. I didn't feel tricked, but I felt, wow, why didn't anyone tell me about this sooner? So I wanted to get it out there, and that's what Hidden Riches does. There aren't a lot of helpful guides. There are lots of sourcebooks and compendiums of texts, but I think some students open those up and ask, what do I do with these? Hidden Riches is a bit narrower in how many texts it presents, but it takes key case studies from across the canon and walks students through why scholars have these conversations and why they care. It's meant to help.

Johnny Ova: That's awesome, and so true, and the fact that your dad is in the same field is pretty cool too. We mentioned this before we started recording, but I've been a Christian going on twenty-two or twenty-three years, and pastoring a church with my wife for fifteen years, going on sixteen. The discovery that people in antiquity engaged with the Holy Scriptures very differently than we do today, and the additional writings and books that even get quoted in the Scriptures, and how they viewed God, some accurately and some not, is fascinating. Like the question I asked you: why does everybody think God is always angry with them? Bad things happen, God's mad at me. Good things happen, God loves me. It's similar today. Something bad happens, what did I do wrong? Something good happens, I must be doing something right. I'm excited to get further into the conversation. Let's get into some of your controversial topics. Let's talk about creation. Most people know Genesis 1, but they've never heard of the Enuma Elish or the Memphite Theology. How do those texts change the way we understand what Genesis is actually doing?

Dr. Christopher Hays: This is a fairly complex case study to start with, because each ancient civilization had more than one creation story. What the book does is pick two of the most famous, one from Mesopotamia and one from Egypt, and set them side by side with Genesis 1 and 2. They're somewhat different as literature. In the Mesopotamian story, you've got a battle in which the god Marduk slays the sea dragon Tiamat and spreads out her carcass to form the world. That's a different story from what we get in the Bible. In the Egyptian text, which is perhaps more similar to Genesis 1, the god Ptah in a sense speaks the world into existence, and everything comes from his mouth. So there's something slightly more familiar, but these are different.

Dr. Christopher Hays: What I think they suggest is that the authors of Genesis 1 and 2 probably didn't have texts of these other myths on their desks, as it were, when they wrote the creation stories we have now. But I do suggest that they were conscious of these existing ideas in the wider world, and that when they portrayed Yahweh's creation of the universe, they wanted in some way to respond to those surrounding cultures. It's like Jesus' parables: you have heard it said, but I say to you. You've heard that the world was created by a god cutting up some other god. But I say to you that God made the separations of day and night, dry land and water, not with a sword but simply by speaking his word. I think we want to name both things. It's worth talking about the commonalities among all these stories and myths, but there are also differences, and each myth is its own. It isn't simply the same, and it isn't simply borrowed. We can talk about other case studies, but with the creation myths it's more of a conversation with the surrounding cultures and a way for the author to stake his own claim about who God is.

Johnny Ova: You have an MA in Egyptology, which is rare for an Old Testament scholar. What does Egypt bring to the table that Babylon and Assyria don't, and why has Egyptian influence on Israel been so overlooked?

Dr. Christopher Hays: That's a funny story, and something I almost backed my way into. I wrote my PhD dissertation on Isaiah and his use of death imagery, and I suddenly realized as I worked through it how much of what he's talking about Egypt sheds light on. After my PhD, I already had this job. This is after 2008, I'm here in LA, and I connected with some of the UCLA Egyptology faculty, especially Kara Cooney, who was my teacher and has become a good friend, and I just kept going deeper and deeper. What you realize is that in the ancient Near Eastern world, Egypt is an incredibly important force and power in the southern part of the region. They had huge cultural influence all over, certainly in the area that became Israel and Judah, all over the coastlands and some of the islands, and that continues into the period of the Old Testament.

Dr. Christopher Hays: The reason more people who work in Bible don't study it is the linguistic cost. It's a whole different language system from the Semitic languages, the family Hebrew belongs to. There are a few shared loanwords and similar features, but on the whole you're starting over, whereas once you know Hebrew, it's not hard to go to Aramaic and the other Semitic languages. By the time most people have worked all the way through a PhD, they're done with languages. But Egyptian is a beautiful language and a huge body of texts. It opens up a very large range of data that really matters and ought to be talked about more. That's one of my little hobby horses, the pitch I find myself making all the time: pay attention to Egypt.

Johnny Ova: For those listening, I think two things are important to understand. First, with Isaiah, for example, or whatever text you're reading, these books were written over a period of time by people coming from a specific place and upbringing. Think of yourself: your childhood was a certain way, and now you're sitting down to write a letter, framing it from your past experiences. Somebody with a great marriage encourages marriage. Somebody who has been married seven times with terrible marriages comes from a different stance: maybe you shouldn't do this. Our background frames that. And with Egypt specifically, Egypt is always seen as the bad guy in the Scriptures. You need the bad guy to get the good guy, so anything from Egypt must not be good, when that's not the case. I see the same thing with the Pharisees.

Dr. Christopher Hays: That's true. When you actually read the Old Testament narrative, you see Egypt playing a far more positive, friendly role than people think, beyond the Exodus and the slavery stories. When kings in Judah were under pressure, they often fled to Egypt. Egypt came to the help of Jerusalem when the Assyrians laid siege in 701. So there was a partnership there, as well as some historical baggage, shall we say.

Johnny Ova: The Instruction of Amenemope and the book of Proverbs have striking similarities. Are we looking at direct borrowing, shared tradition or something else entirely?

Dr. Christopher Hays: This is one of the few cases where, unlike the creation stories, people actually do theorize that there may have been more direct textual borrowing. The reason is that these three chapters in Proverbs have thirty sayings, as does the Egyptian instruction, and they share some of the same language. Some phrases in the Hebrew seem to be more or less translations of Egyptian phrases that don't usually appear in Hebrew. So the scribe of Proverbs may be working from some kind of wisdom tradition. If you try to line up the thirty sayings, it's not one-to-one. About half of them correlate with each other. As with anything else, the author of Proverbs is certainly putting his own spin on them.

Dr. Christopher Hays: In general, the wisdom tradition is more international than some others, because it's less theological in some ways. If you think about what wisdom is, it's advice for life, and certain kinds of life advice probably work regardless of what gods you worship. There are just certain things in life that make sense. So it's a natural place to get even more intense cross-cultural sharing, the same way that how you make money here probably isn't that different from how you make money in Europe or the Middle East. We can share advice on those things.

Johnny Ova: When it comes to Israel's law codes, how do texts like the Code of Hammurabi or the Hittite treaty documents shape the way we should understand the Mosaic covenant?

Dr. Christopher Hays: These are again ones we could approach either from the standpoint of similarities or of differences. Law texts share many of the same forms: if this, then that. If this happens, if a man wants to leave his wife, and so on. Those forms are obviously shared across cultures, and that's also true of the covenant form. Both Exodus and Deuteronomy share common ancient Near Eastern covenant forms, where there's a suzerain, the more powerful figure, who gives a law and makes stipulations people have to keep to keep the covenant. It's fascinating to watch the authors of the Bible use those common forms. But there are differences. In the case of covenant, it's very unusual to have the deity function as the king. In most ancient Near Eastern covenants it's a king, and there may be gods thought to be watching and guaranteeing the covenant, but it's very rare for a deity to be portrayed as the king who gives the law. Usually it's the king himself.

Dr. Christopher Hays: Hammurabi gets to give the law. At the top of his famous stela, you see a picture of the king being handed a scepter of power by the god Shamash. But Shamash doesn't speak the law the way God does in the Bible. Shamash gives Hammurabi the right to make the law, and then the king gives the law. So the Torah elevates God's role to the actual lawgiver. That's a striking contrast. And to circle back to the content of the laws themselves, there's a lot of back and forth about whether different law codes express different worldviews. There are real similarities between the laws of Hammurabi and the laws of the Torah, but some would say there's a different worldview. For example, in Hammurabi, if you kill someone, you can sometimes pay a fee for the person's life: I'm sorry I killed that person, here's seventy shekels. In Old Testament law it's more often capital punishment. There's no way to pay off having killed someone. One theory is that because God is the lawgiver, breaking the law is sin and not just a federal crime, as it were. I'm not deeply immersed in those conversations right now, so I don't have a horse in that race, but I think it's worth thinking about.

Johnny Ova: Do you think that's why, in the story of Moses receiving the law, there's this imagery of God giving the law to a king-like figure, Moses, who then distributes what God has said? Would that be some kind of similarity?

Dr. Christopher Hays: No, I think this is actually one of the unique points of the Bible. I don't know of anything else where God is said to write with his own finger, as with the Decalogue. In the end, it is Moses who speaks most of the law to the people in the Torah, and in some ways Moses functions as a royal figure. But God's deep involvement in actually handing down the law is a distinctive point. When you think about how the law was received over the course of Judaism, it's not surprising that it's one of the most distinctive points of the faith.

Johnny Ova: There's a long history in the church of treating Israel as completely unique among its neighbors. Where does that idea come from, and where does the evidence push back on it?

Dr. Christopher Hays: The Old Testament itself makes these claims. It talks about Israel as a people set apart at times. Think about the conquest accounts, where the people first come into the land after the Exodus and are told to drive out all the people around them. In theory they're trying to occupy a space they claim is theirs by right and not share things with the surrounding cultures. And the tradition of revelation we just talked about from Sinai, the idea that the law is handed down straight from God, might suggest a quite distinct culture. However, as we've been discussing, and as a reading of Hidden Riches will show, almost all of the literary genres in the Bible have something you can compare them to from the surrounding cultures. They're certainly using the stuff of those cultures. As I've said more than once, I think it's fair to say they're doing something different with it. They're not simply cribbing or plagiarizing from other cultures, but they are of their time. All these texts are the stuff of their time.

Dr. Christopher Hays: If we pull the lens back a bit and talk more theologically, people are sometimes troubled by this, but it's something we should expect from the God we know. God's most fundamental act of self-revelation was in Jesus Christ, and by the confessions of the Christian church, Christ was both fully divine and fully human. If that's true of the Word of God incarnate, why should that not also be true of the Word of God written? The Bible is a fully human text, and by some miracle, in much the same way that Christ was also fully divine, we confess that the Bible is fully divine. Once you make the connection that you're totally free to study it as a human text, it's so freeing, because you can stop fighting all the comparative points that often trouble readers when they first encounter ancient Near Eastern comparative study.

Johnny Ova: Great point. I know you've written extensively about Isaiah and the ancient empires, as you mentioned. How did Assyrian propaganda, royal ideology and even death cults shape what Isaiah was doing in his prophetic writing?

Dr. Christopher Hays: That's a big question with a lot to say, and I'll try to be concise. On imperial propaganda, which he encountered from the Neo-Assyrian Empire, one of the most interesting observations people make is that Isaiah listened to what the Assyrians were saying and then turned it around and made his own contrary claims. The king of Assyria wanted the full faith of all his vassals. All the peoples he conquered were supposed to owe him total faith. What Isaiah and other prophets of the time did was say, you owe faithfulness to the Lord. It's using the empire's own language to undermine its claims, which people still do today. You say you believe this, but actually, there are all kinds of ways to use people's propaganda against them, and Isaiah was certainly in that category. People also talk about this as where some of the monotheistic language we now have for God came into focus in a new way. When Second Isaiah says, I am the Lord and there is no other, that's fairly imperial language, but it hadn't often been used for God in the past, because most of the surrounding cultures were polytheistic in some way. It's a striking adaptation of imperial faith language, if you will. That's one example. I could go on, but that's a good start.

Johnny Ova: That's all good. The polytheistic point is interesting, because I believe it's pretty clear in the Old Testament that some writers believed in multiple gods, with our God just being the strongest, a monolatry kind of mentality, versus polytheism. Then that transformed into where many Christians are today, monotheistic: ours is the only one true God. It's interesting to see that evolve over time.

Dr. Christopher Hays: That's right. Look at a text like the Shema: you shall love the Lord your God. It says the Lord is your God, the Lord alone. But it doesn't say there are no other gods. It just says Yahweh is your God. So it calls for faithfulness to one God while still leaving room for the implication that there are other gods out there. Monotheism as such comes along a bit later.

Johnny Ova: One of your key arguments is that Isaiah 24 through 27 is not apocalyptic, and that's a pretty big claim. Walk us through what you believe those chapters are actually about and why the evidence points away from an end-times reading.

Dr. Christopher Hays: That's one of my more recent books, and it's one I'm still pushing. In fact, I've got a new article on this topic right now. I don't know whether most of your listeners will know what's at stake, but this text has often been understood as the latest part of the book of Isaiah, even though it's more or less in the middle of the book. I think that's basically because it has been stripped of most of its clear historical references. It doesn't name any kings, and most of the place names don't resonate with people or have a clear historical horizon. So there's been no historical anchor. It also talks about things like the dead rising and the widespread destruction of the earth, themes that look like late Hellenistic apocalyptic literature.

Dr. Christopher Hays: So people have assumed, and this comes largely out of Christian scholarship, that talk about the dead rising could only have come later, close to the time of Jesus Christ. Scholars like Bernhard Duhm, who had a huge influence on how people still read Isaiah, dated parts of this text in his commentary from more than a hundred years ago to around the first century, around the time of Jesus or after. Of course, once we found the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have a copy of the book of Isaiah from around 200 BC, so we know it's not actually that late. When you study these themes and motifs, you find they all have deep ancient Near Eastern ties to other royal rhetoric, and there's no reason they have to be late.

Dr. Christopher Hays: The pioneering part of my book on this, which will come out in a further article with one of the leading Israeli archaeologists, Oded Lipschits, is that he and I have shown this connects with the period of Josiah. It's after Isaiah's time, and it's about the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. So all the grand rhetoric about the dead rising is the people being restored to life by the freedom to live apart from the Assyrian Empire. Throughout the passage it talks about a lofty city of foreigners that falls and is destroyed, and Lipschits and I now think his team has found some of these Neo-Assyrian sites that were actually destroyed in that same period. It's a fairly detailed scholarly argument, and I know it gets into weeds most podcast listeners don't have a framework for, but in the long run it's going to reshape how scholars understand the formation of the book of Isaiah. I have a couple of commentaries on the book, one in press and a bigger one in the works, so I think in fifty years we'll be having a different conversation about the whole book, which is exciting to me.

Johnny Ova: That's very exciting. The books that are out, we're going to link in the description on YouTube, Apple and Spotify, so you can support Dr. Hays and get a copy. It's fascinating information. For many Christians who, to be honest, aren't around the texts and the sites with their hands in it like you, it's very difficult. I think our job as Christians trying to understand the Bible in context is to do the best we can to get to the heart of the original author's intent, because otherwise we don't have a clue what they meant. There's a lot you can pull from it, and that's the journey and the exciting part. You've described Scripture as respiratory: breathing in the culture around it and breathing it back out in a different form. Can you explain that idea and give a concrete example of how it works in a specific text?

Dr. Christopher Hays: That's interesting. I think we could look back at some of the case studies we've talked about. What I was going for there is the sense of life I think this brings to our reading of the Old Testament. We talk a lot about scribes and texts and shared words here and there, and that can start to feel kind of dusty. What I'm asking people to think about is that in the inspiration of the authors of the Bible, it's both God's Spirit and also some of the spirit of their times that they were breathing in. The respiratory imagery is meant to show where some of the liveliness of the Old Testament comes from. It's partly from the surrounding cultures.

Dr. Christopher Hays: Go back to a case like the creation stories. These authors lived in times when they were surrounded by people telling other creation stories. Put yourself in the role of a scribe in Jerusalem in the ninth or eighth century, or the sixth century. You have people coming into your kingdom from the surrounding nations with their own stories about where the gods came from. I sometimes picture them all sitting around a campfire telling stories, and some foreigner, or maybe even one of your own countrymen, says, this is what I heard about where the world came from. And that scribe, steeped in Yahwistic theology, says, well, let me tell you. So they take it in, and then breathe back out their own version in a very lifelike way. That was my attempt to name that process of taking in and giving back.

Johnny Ova: That makes sense. I know you may not come from a pastoral perspective, but let me ask from an academic angle. For pastors and church leaders who want to take the ancient Near Eastern context seriously but worry it undermines the authority of Scripture, how would you answer that concern?

Dr. Christopher Hays: It's a great question, and in fact I come at this from both an academic and a pastoral perspective. I'm ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA, and I preach and teach in my local church. It's a very valid question, but I wouldn't be troubled by it, because this is the whole history of Christianity. I sometimes think of the great Martin Luther, who took tunes from beer hall songs and turned them into some of the great hymns of our Christian tradition. That ability to interact with the surrounding culture, even forms of it that seem totally secular, is crucial. You and I both live in big cities. We have to work with non-Christians outside our churches all the time. We have to be able to find common ground and figure out how to have conversations. I want to go to a church where the pastor can see good things in the surrounding culture and doesn't just preach separation and hatred for those other parts of our culture.

Dr. Christopher Hays: I know that's not shared by all Christians. Some seem most motivated by wanting to separate and distinguish themselves. But I think it has to be both, a give and take with the culture, and I think a comparative way of thinking is a very important pastoral insight. In fact, I'm giving a talk later this year at Pepperdine University. They've asked me to talk about good things in the Christian tradition, and I think I'll focus on this, because there's been a fairly strong strand of it throughout Christian history, whether with Jewish conversation partners or other cultural influences on the church. I think we've gotten a lot of good out of that, and that process goes all the way back to when they first wrote the earliest parts of the Old Testament.

Johnny Ova: One more question before we close out today. As I said, we're going to link Dr. Hays' book, and it's a great place to start learning, comparing and seeing the parallels. Here's my final question, Dr. Hays. You direct the master's program in ancient Near Eastern studies at Fuller, and you've trained the next generation of scholars in this field. What are the biggest blind spots you still see in how the church engages with the Old Testament?

Dr. Christopher Hays: What a great question again. I think we don't have a sense of either the whole narrative of the Old Testament or its historical grounding. That's what I end up teaching. I'm in the middle of teaching my intro to Old Testament course right now, and I think I make students learn a few more dates and a few more places on the map than some intro courses do. As Christians we tend to cherry-pick the Old Testament, a verse here and there. Often it's a Christological interpretation, which is fine. That's a core part of how we read the Bible, and I'm not teaching against it. But the idea that God was actually doing something real through the whole Old Testament, revealing himself to the people in true and helpful ways that we're still meant to have, is a crucial affirmation. When you have a sense of the whole historical story in its context, that capacity to care about what God was doing with the people then is such an important part of understanding it. It's three quarters of our Bible. The New Testament is short by comparison. So as a teacher or a preacher, you really want to have access to the Old Testament on its own terms and not just those few cherry-picked sections that people like to preach. It's the wholeness and the historical context that I'd most ask people to pay attention to.

Johnny Ova: I appreciate that. Dr. Hays, this has been absolutely great. Thank you for joining us today on the Dig In.

Dr. Christopher Hays: It's been great to be here with you, and thank you for the great questions.