What Hebrew Manuscripts Teach Us Today w/ Dr. Kevin Chen

Johnny Ova: Welcome back to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and we have an amazing special guest with us today, Dr. Kevin Chen. Thank you so much for joining us and taking your time to be with us today.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Thank you, Pastor Johnny. I'm so glad to be on with you and your listeners.

Johnny Ova: It's really a pleasure. Before we get into the manuscripts, which I can't wait to ask you a whole bunch of questions about, tell us a little about your background. Were you raised in a Christian home? How did your journey with Scripture and with God begin, and why dedicate your life to this?

Dr. Kevin Chen: My mother was the first person in my immediate family to become a believer, and that happened in the first few years of elementary school for me. My parents had come to the United States for graduate school, to the Chicago area, and they were not believers at that time. After they moved to California for work, my mom, who was a nurse at the time, had someone share the gospel with her, and she became a believer. That's how the faith journey for my whole family began. At first, for me, it looked more like being dragged to church by my mother. But by God's grace I became a believer myself a few years later, in sixth grade, and I was baptized at that time. A lot has happened since then, but that's how I came to faith.

Johnny Ova: That's great. This is why we evangelize and share the good news of the gospel. You never know what effect one person you impact for the gospel will have for generations and generations.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Yeah, totally.

Johnny Ova: Amazing. So let's talk about the Hebrew manuscripts. Explain to our listeners what we're actually talking about when we say Hebrew manuscripts, and why modern Christians should even care about them.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Hebrew manuscripts are handwritten copies of the Old Testament, and they are not always complete copies. Probably a lot of us have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are a major find as it relates to Hebrew manuscripts. Some of those manuscripts are biblical, that is, handwritten Hebrew texts of portions of the Old Testament, or of entire Old Testament books in the case of Isaiah. Others are not biblical texts. They related to the community that lived at Qumran, and scholars research them and sometimes make educated guesses about what kind of community that was, because they were living in that location too. Hebrew manuscripts are very important to Christians, and to Jewish people as well, because they represent the earliest written texts of Scripture. Our translations of the Bible, whether into English or other modern languages, are all based on Hebrew manuscripts in the case of the Old Testament.

Johnny Ova: So why do we have fragments and not whole books? Were they destroyed, ripped apart, or did they write them in parts?

Dr. Kevin Chen: The main reason relates to archaeological or ancient historical evidence in general. Not all of it gets preserved or lasts. Whether it's a Hebrew manuscript of the Bible or, staying with Qumran, one of their other manuscripts about their community life, without some special circumstance those manuscripts don't last for 2,000 years. They decay. What's so special about Qumran and the Dead Sea is that the conditions in the caves, the pots and so on were just perfect for preserving those manuscripts all this time. But that also means most ancient manuscripts, biblical or otherwise, are just lost to time and decay. They're not necessarily destroyed. A small number probably were, but for the most part they just don't last that long.

Johnny Ova: It goes to show you the intent. When I say God preserved his word, the fact that the conditions just happened to be perfect, and the number of copies and all that work, is really remarkable.

Dr. Kevin Chen: It's amazing. There are some whole books that have been preserved, and like I mentioned, the Book of Isaiah is a famous example. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are kind of like a rock band. They go on tour. If you get to see them at the sites where they make their stops, you don't usually get to see an entire scroll. It really will be a fragment. But even that fragment is very precious, just because of its rarity.

Johnny Ova: That's amazing. Are there any misconceptions you feel Christians have about the reliability or significance of the Hebrew text?

Dr. Kevin Chen: I don't know about a lot of misconceptions. I think maybe there's a lack of familiarity, a natural sense of foreignness. It's another language, and a lot of times you're dealing with what basically look like scraps. Fragments is kind of a nicer word, but sometimes they really are scraps. They do have ancient writing on them, and a lot of times, really most if not all the time, they confirm the reliability of our translations today.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Maybe I can fill in something that might be helpful to your listeners. For a long time before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the late '40s, translations of the Bible, not only English ones, were based primarily on a Hebrew manuscript from about 1000 AD. That was the best we had. Actually, it's still a very good and reliable text, because it had been faithfully preserved by a group of Jewish scribes called the Masoretes, who were very meticulous. That text is still considered very important and even authoritative, if not absolutely authoritative, today. But you can imagine the kinds of questions that might come up, whether from a Christian or especially a skeptic. This complete Old Testament text happens to be complete, though other texts from that period aren't. But it's a thousand years after the time of Jesus, and the Old Testament was supposedly written before that. Over a millennium has elapsed. How sure are you of the reliability of the scribes?

Dr. Kevin Chen: We're not trying to cast doubt on them, but can you at least confirm it, from an honest perspective, without being overly critical? I think what the Dead Sea Scrolls do is confirm so much of that. All of a sudden you're finding Hebrew manuscripts a thousand years older than what was previously the oldest Hebrew text of the Bible, and they very much confirm that later text from 1000 AD. Yes, there are some small differences, but they are not enough to make a major impact on translation.

Johnny Ova: Incredible stuff. I'm definitely going to turn this to The Messianic Vision of the Pentateuch, the book you wrote. But first I want to ask you this, because I believe the Old Testament gets such a bad rap compared to the New Testament. Correct me if I'm wrong, feel free to disagree. I feel one of the main issues a lot of the people I engage with have with Old Testament Scripture is that they miss the context, the culture, the beauty and the deeper meaning, the full story being told, because they pick out individual verses. The way we describe it is God-dictated versus God-breathed. So many people take every scripture as a dictation or a prescription: you must do this. When you pluck out a particular story or verse, it can look like God is an awful God in how he deals with some people. But if you read the whole text in context and see the story, a description of what's actually going on and how God worked through imperfect humans to still get to this unbelievable pinnacle in Jesus Christ, it's different. We call it the redemptive arc, from the fall all the way to Christ, with God breathing on things that maybe are not ideal but are pushing you closer to "it is finished," the final consummation in Jesus Christ. Any thoughts on that?

Dr. Kevin Chen: That's a great question and a great point. Before I started doing what I do as a Bible professor, when I was in middle school and high school, I was blessed to have a youth pastor who challenged us to read the whole Bible straight through. I think that did for me exactly what you're talking about, Pastor Johnny. It gave us an idea of the whole story of Scripture, which is actually the whole story of the world and the universe. Genesis 1:1, which we all know: in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And where does it all end up? He creates a new heavens and a new earth, described in prophecy and in Revelation. That encompasses all of history. I think that sparked in me a love for the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. It's good for us to encourage and exhort people over and over to love the Bible, but we also need to show how that works for the Old Testament specifically. What do you do with it?

Dr. Kevin Chen: Back to my own reading through Scripture, what it really gave me was an appreciation of the buildup to the coming of Christ. Relatively speaking, the Old Testament covers a lot more history. Its narratives cover a lot more time. Certainly the most important period of history so far is the coming of Jesus, the God-man, to save all of us, but there's a buildup to that. Reading and studying the Old Testament can help us understand and appreciate who Jesus is. If he fulfills the covenant with Abraham, what does that mean? There's no way to answer that without the Old Testament. If people are calling him Son of David, what does that mean? What expectations are there? Maybe some of the expectations people had were a little misguided, but what are the expectations actually there in the Old Testament?

Dr. Kevin Chen: And how do all these things work with the fall of the Davidic dynasty, when they're exiled to Babylon, and now there's another so-called Son of David? How does that fit the covenant God made with David? All of this comes out of the Old Testament, not to mention creation and the fall, the origin of sin and Satan's role in all of it. The New Testament definitely has something to say on these things too, but I think both together really enrich our sense of identity and our understanding of what it means to be a Christian.

Johnny Ova: It's like turning on a movie and watching only the last 20 minutes and trying to figure out the whole storyline.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Yes, it's exactly like that.

Johnny Ova: So let's get into some of these. In your book The Messianic Vision of the Pentateuch, you argue that Moses intentionally wrote about the Messiah. How do the manuscripts preserve that vision, and can you give us a couple of examples where this messianic thread stands out clearly to you?

Dr. Kevin Chen: To frame this question, and it ties into our earlier discussion, one of the things that makes the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible as some prefer to call it, so interesting to study is that it is a highly debated, contested and controversial text, and it has been for 2,000 years easily. What I'm getting at is the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and Jesus, who we believe to be the Messiah. It's the question of the relationship, if any, between the Old Testament and what Christians call the gospel. That's what we're wrestling with. When I describe it that way, maybe some folks start to see why it's been so controversial all this time. Some read the same Old Testament and don't come away with the same meaning. It actually happens within Jesus' own lifetime, on the pages of the New Testament, with Jesus and the Pharisees, their scholars. They didn't call it the Old Testament, but we could say they're Old Testament scholars.

Dr. Kevin Chen: There isn't even one strand of Jewish interpretation at that time, because we read in the Gospels that the Pharisees and Sadducees disagreed about certain things. Then you have the disciples. They're Jewish too, but when they came to understand the Old Testament in a new way, the way Jesus taught them, they realized it was about Jesus all along, even a Jesus who would die and rise on the third day. Paul in the synagogues is essentially doing the same thing after the resurrection. He's trying to persuade them that the Scriptures they study and treasure so dearly really are about Jesus, the Messiah who died and rose again on the third day for the sins of the world and to redeem us from death. So that's a little framing. That whole debate reflects on every book of the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch, because the Pentateuch emphasizes the law of God the most. No other book describes the law in such detail. You get reflections on it and remembrances of it elsewhere, but if you want the record of the giving of the law, it's in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

Dr. Kevin Chen: To finally circle back to your question, where do I, and not just me, see prophecies of a Messiah in the Pentateuch? I look for them in certain key passages, such as Genesis 3:15. After the fall, God pronounces judgment on the three guilty parties: the serpent, the woman and Adam. As he pronounces judgment on the serpent, he says, I will put enmity, or continued strife, between you and the woman, that's Eve, and between your seed and her seed. The conflict that just happened in the garden, where you tricked her and you won, is going to continue in your respective offspring. But it sounds like at a certain point the conflict will end. It's not forever, because the next sentence in Genesis 3:15 says the seed of the woman will crush your head. He's going to crush the snake's head, while the snake is going to strike the heel of the seed of the woman.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Like I mentioned earlier, this verse, the seed of the woman text, is controversial and debated. If you look online or ask ChatGPT for an interpretation, it may give you one or a few options. But let me explain why I think a messianic interpretation makes sense here. When the seed of the woman crushes the serpent's head, it doesn't say he crushes the serpent's seed's head, even though it just said there would be enmity between the woman's seed and the serpent's seed. You might expect the woman's seed to crush the serpent's seed. I think that's also true, but the verse itself says the seed of the woman will crush the serpent's head. Somehow that means the serpent is still going to be around whenever this seed of the woman comes. You keep reading Genesis, the Pentateuch and the Old Testament, and this seed of the woman has not yet come. Does the serpent's head get crushed? That does not happen in the Old Testament. You won't find it anywhere, except in prophecy.

Dr. Kevin Chen: That suggests we're not dealing with some ordinary serpent. And you have a human being, a man, because the seed is a he. Hebrew pronouns differentiate between he and she, just like English. There's going to be a son, and he is going to defeat this serpent. It doesn't spell it out, but it hints that this guy is something special, because if you read the whole Old Testament and nobody crushes the serpent's head, that suggests nobody could. It's not that obvious, but maybe nobody could, and this guy can. He's special. At the same time he also gets wounded. His heel gets struck. The alignment with the coming of Jesus and his death on the cross is, I think, very strong. There are also some grammatical issues in the Hebrew. When it says he will crush your head, it's more likely that "he" refers to an individual, as I've been assuming, rather than to humanity as a whole, her offspring as a group, crushing the serpent's head. So on the level of Hebrew language, I think it's more likely that "he" refers to an individual son, a man.

Dr. Kevin Chen: That would be one example, and I pull out others in the book. But that one by itself makes a huge difference for the Pentateuch as a whole, Genesis through Deuteronomy, and even the whole Old Testament. I'm not going to assume you or all your listeners are immediately convinced, but let's say some of you already are or come to be. What it means is that the Old Testament is already telling us that salvation comes through a suffering Messiah. It's already telling you in Genesis 3. In that sense it doesn't matter what other supposed hopes of salvation come later, because it already told you right here. I think that affects the way I interpret the giving of the law. Yes, there are many passages about the law where it's talking about consequences: if you obey you're blessed, if you disobey you're cursed. But wait, what about Genesis 3:15? It already said a seed of the woman is going to crush the snake's head.

Dr. Kevin Chen: So even though Exodus through Leviticus is so law-focused, at least from Exodus 20 on, the defeat of the serpent is still going to come through the seed of the woman. Genesis 3:15 doesn't have anything to do with the law. There's no mention of the giving of the law. That's not saying the law isn't important or doesn't have its uses. It does. It reveals the character of God and all kinds of things. But for what the Pentateuch is saying, and even what the Old Testament means from its third chapter on, the impact is major. That's also why, from a different angle, I think the passage is so debated. Depending on how you decide this one, there's a massive domino effect on how you read everything else in the Old Testament and how you relate the Old and New Testaments. I think there are other passages in the Pentateuch that reinforce and fill out this original messianic prophecy in Genesis 3:15. But I'll pause there in case you want to follow up.

Johnny Ova: I do want to continue that. I just want to say that we have all of Dr. Chen's works linked in the description below, so if you want to check out his books, please do. We know you'll be blessed by his work. I was going to ask, and you kind of touched on it: what's the opposing view? What else do people say that verse could be referencing?

Dr. Kevin Chen: There have been quite a few different interpretations, and I want to be respectful of them, because they're established positions held by people who believe them strongly. I'm not even sure the position I'm taking is a majority view, and I don't know if there is a majority view among the many out there. This is one of those verses where if you punt, you end up with nothing, because there may not be a majority view. And a lot of times the controversial verses in the Old Testament are the messianic ones, so if you let go of those, you end up with a weaker connection between Christ and the Old Testament. That's what I'm out here doing, sometimes in a more academic way, though it doesn't always have to be like that. To answer your question directly, some would say, okay, maybe this just has to do with human beings and snakes, and this is why a lot of people don't like snakes. I don't think that's a very popular view, but it's been put out there.

Johnny Ova: That's a bit of a placebo effect too, if all you're taught is snakes are bad, snakes are bad. I've seen this kind of thinking go to levels where people are scared of pumpkins because they reference Halloween. Yet pumpkin pie is pretty good. I like it anyway. But it gets in your head.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Right. It's an interpretation that ultimately makes the verse fall flat and not have much of a purpose. A more common one is to see the seed of the woman as humanity in general instead of as an individual. That's taken in the direction of, well, because of the word seed, it can refer to a group, just like the words offspring or seed can in English. The Hebrew word is zera. Like seed and offspring in English, it can be one seed, like a plant seed, or a whole bag of seed. Or I could say I have two kids. If I only had one, I could say my offspring and refer to that one. But if you have more than one kid, you can still say they're your offspring.

Dr. Kevin Chen: So the Hebrew word zera, translated seed or offspring in Genesis 3:15, is like that. There's room within the word itself for it to refer to a group, and there are examples in the Old Testament where it does. So the rub is, are there ever instances where it refers to an individual, and how do you tell? That gets into Hebrew language and grammar that you can check out in the book if you're interested. But to give you a brief summary: if there's a pronoun that refers back to that seed, by and large whether the pronoun is singular or plural matches whether the seed itself is singular or plural. So if it said there will be enmity between your seed and her seed, and they will crush your head, then it's more likely the seed of the woman is plural, because it said they. But because it says he will crush your head, it's more likely an individual.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Those are a few ways people look at it. Then there's a kind of both-and, a mediating position, where some take the seed of the woman as a group, humanity, but ultimately there's still one person who comes out of that group, the Messiah, who crushes the snake's head and gets wounded. For me, I just think there's a closer fit if you take it as singular all the way through, because it's not humanity as a whole, or even Christians as a whole, that crush the head of Satan directly, much less have our heels struck by him. Rather, it's an individual who crushes the snake's head and who has his heel struck. We participate in his victory in an indirect way. We don't gain that victory directly ourselves.

Johnny Ova: I want to get into what I keep hearing you reference as nexus passages in a second. But I heard a podcast you did where you brought up the structure of Hebrew narrative, specifically the importance of repetition. How does that shape interpretation, when you see things repeated, and how they're repeated?

Dr. Kevin Chen: Repetition in the Bible is one of the most important ways that a biblical author can signal to us as readers what is important. In contrast, when we have a verbal dialogue like we're having now, we can vary the volume, the speed and the tone of our voice. There are a lot of tools we can use to emphasize things, and we can clarify things too, if you ask me a question and we follow up. Give me one second, let me close the door. We use those kinds of tools to communicate in live dialogue. A written text is different. It's the same language, but it's not a dialogue anymore, and there's no volume, no pacing, no tone of voice. So what does an author have at his or her disposal? One of the most important things is repetition.

Dr. Kevin Chen: That ties into something else you mentioned, my more recent book about nexus passages. I coined the term, by the way, but it's a new term for something people have already recognized in the Bible: some passages have a lot more connections to other passages than your average passage does. If you pick any verse at random out of Scripture, it will connect to the verse before and the verse after. That's a given. That's the immediate context. But nexus passages connect not only to their immediate context, the section they're in, maybe the previous and next chapter, but even more and even further. The way you discern these connections is through repetition. You look first and foremost for repeated words. That's not the only criterion, but it's the strongest kind of evidence.

Dr. Kevin Chen: To go back to Genesis 3:15, it uses the word seed. Even a casual reader of Genesis who pays attention to the word seed will notice it keeps popping up. When God calls Abraham in Genesis 12, he says, leave your family and go to the land I'll show you. A few verses later, in verse 7, he says, to your seed I will give this land. A few chapters later it's been over ten years, still no promised son or seed, and in Genesis 15 Abraham is wondering, Lord, where is the son you said you would give me? In that dialogue, where the Lord reassures Abram in a vision, he promises him a seed. That's a form of repetition, and it continues throughout the Abraham story. You can connect it with the promised seed of Genesis 3:15. There's a theme of seed running like a thread through the book. That's how repetition works, and a nexus passage will have multiple terms repeated from other passages.

Dr. Kevin Chen: One off the top of my head that I talk about in the newer book is Numbers 24, where there's another important messianic prophecy in verse 17: a star out of Jacob and a scepter that will rise from Israel. On the one hand that gives us a beautiful image, a star and a scepter. At the same time, those words, star and scepter, can be traced back to the Abrahamic promises. How? When God promises Abraham numerous offspring, he does it in multiple ways. He says a great nation. He says they'll be as numerous as the dust of the earth, the sand on the seashore and the stars in the heavens. So in Numbers 24:17 it's a prophecy of one star who's going to come out of Jacob. Jacob in a sense is many stars, because Abraham's descendants are or will be many stars, but there's also going to be one star, the star of Jacob.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Likewise, scepter comes from yet another important messianic prophecy, Genesis 49, where Jacob is blessing his sons one by one. They're going to become the future tribes of Israel, and to Judah he says, the scepter will not depart from Judah. In other words, Judah will be the royal tribe, the one kings come from, and of course David and the house of David come from there. Even before David comes, Numbers 24:17 says this star of Jacob is also a scepter from Israel. So that's repetition. I treat Numbers 24 as a nexus passage because it has those connections and more to previous passages in the Pentateuch, especially concerning the Messiah and the Abrahamic covenant promises.

Johnny Ova: You've got to check out this book and connect with Dr. Chen. I did stalk you on Facebook a little bit, Dr. Chen, just to check you out, watching the YouTube videos and listening to the podcasts, and I ordered a couple of the books. It's fascinating to me, so thank you for your work. I know we have a time limit today, so I have one more question. For the listeners, what are some good first steps for Christians who want to engage more deeply with the Hebrew Bible or the manuscript traditions? How would somebody even get started understanding these verses more in depth?

Dr. Kevin Chen: I can think of a couple of ways. One is harder, and that's to start learning Hebrew. It's a long process, but there might be a small contingent of your listeners for whom that's an encouragement. It can be done, and if you feel the motivation and have space in your life, it's worth it. Another way would be to consult books that use Hebrew and explain it in a way an English reader can understand. Maybe you can at least learn some key Hebrew words related to whatever you're interested in. If you're interested in seed, it's not too hard to learn one Hebrew word, zera, and even learn how the Hebrew letters look, so when it comes up in a book it won't throw you off. There are resources out there, sometimes material online or courses that can help. If you're interested in the Messiah, there are other authors who write on the topic, like my former teacher and doctoral advisor, Dr. John Sailhamer, S-A-I-L-H-A-M-E-R, and others you could find.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Chen, thank you very much for taking the time today. How can people get hold of you? Are you on social media at all? Is there a way for people to get in touch?

Dr. Kevin Chen: I'm on Facebook, so you could look me up there. Just look up Kevin Chen. There might be more than one person with that name. Another way is to look up my faculty page at Gateway Seminary. Gateway Seminary's website is gs.edu, and you could Google it and add my name. I can also just tell you my email address. It's kevinchen, K-E-V-I-N-C-H-E-N, at gs.edu.

Johnny Ova: Any projects coming up for the summer and into the fall and winter?

Dr. Kevin Chen: I'm always working on something. I'm actually done with the next project, and I'm looking forward to it coming out. I've written a Daniel commentary, which should be coming out later this year, Lord willing. It will be published through Langham, an international Christian publisher focused on the global church, as part of a commentary series called the Asia Bible Commentary.

Johnny Ova: Wow. Maybe we'll get you on again to talk about that once it's closer to coming out, if you have time to chat. Again, Dr. Chen, thank you for your time today. I know you're busy, but I know the audience is going to be blessed by our conversation. We had a lot of fun chatting with you.

Dr. Kevin Chen: Thank you so much, Pastor Johnny. It's been fun, and I hope it's been helpful to all of you listeners out there.

Johnny Ova: Yes, sir.