This Book: QnA Sunday (Old Testament) - Deuteronomy 11 v18-22

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Question number one: 

“I have a friend who believes all the right things about Jesus' divinity, his death, his atonement for sin, the resurrection, the second coming. But when we talk about other things, he'll qualify it. And I'm not sure he thinks the story of Jonah actually happened. So I say, “But Jesus referred to it.” And he says, “Well, Jesus referred to the story. He could have been referring to Jack and the Beanstalk. It just means that the story fit what he was going to say next.” So how do I respond to my friend?”  

A very quick overview of the story: Jonah was a prophet (a person God gave messages to deliver to people) like a lot of the prophets Jonah did not want the job. He was given a message he didn’t want to deliver, so he didn't just object, he actually ran away—in the opposite direction he was supposed to go. God was like, “Yeah, I'm not having that.” So God (skipping forward in the story) sent a big fish to swallow Jonah, and to spend three days swimming him closer to where he was supposed to have gone in the first place. Jonah was spat up on the shore and he went, ‘Okay, fine, I will deliver your message.’ So he went to the city of Nineveh and he really just phoned it in. Wandering around, muttering, ‘God has pronounced a verdict on you human scum. You have 40 days.’ He technically delivered the message, but no more than minimum. But much to Jonah's surprise... 

When God saw what they had done and how they had put a stop to their evil ways, he changed his mind and did not carry out the destruction he had threatened. Jonah 3:10 

That made Jonah angry. ‘I knew you were going to do this! That's why I didn't want to deliver the message in the 1st place!’ 

Jonah went and sat on a hill outside of town, pouting and feeling sorry for himself, complaining that God was being too nice. The story ends with God telling Jonah off. 

‘Smarten up! What is wrong with you?’ The end.  

It is an odd story. Odd enough that a lot of people don't think it literally happened. Rather, it seems more like a parable: the kind of story that Jesus made up, pulling things from real life, to make a point. 

How you approach a text like Jonah has a lot to do with how you approach the rest of the Bible.  

You might approach it with a ‘literalist’ or ‘plain text’ reading. Some people read the Bible with the understanding that every single word is literally true. Every event literally happened. 

Another way to read the Bible is a more ‘contextual’ approach: holding different verses, paragraphs, books, and ideas within their own particular context of time and space, and balancing  them within the larger picture.  

I would suggest that whether or not Jonah ‘happened’ is not the most important question. A more important question is this: where is God in this story? Whether parable or event, who is God showing grace and mercy to? Who is God judging and correcting?  

Regardless of what you think about the story of Jonah and its historicity, one thing that we can all agree on is that whether historical or not, it is true. Everything we read about God in Jonah is consistent with everything that we read about God everywhere else in the Bible. Everything that we read about Jonah himself is consistent with what I know to be true of my own human nature. My own capacity for holding grudges, my own capacity for wanting things my own way, my own capacity for trying to tell God how to do his job.  

Regardless of whether Jonah actually ‘happened,’ it is very important for us to remember that generations of believers, Jewish through Christian, recognize the voice that is telling us this story as being the voice of God who wants us to understand something about who he is and about who we are.  

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Question number two:

“Who wrote the book of Genesis, and in particular, the part about creation? Because obviously, nobody was there to see it happen.”  

To the question of who wrote Genesis, there are two main answers 

First, there is the “documentary hypothesis.” This is an understanding by a lot of people who study the Bible that Genesis is an amalgamation of work by several different writers, sorted throughout the text according to vocabulary, sentence structure, and whether they refer to God using the name Yahweh, or the name Elohim? These distinct documents would have been written during the time of judges through to the exile. Then during and after the exile in Babylon and in Persia, the texts would have been collected, collated, and edited into the form that we have today.  

The second widely held understanding is that Genesis was written by Moses. We know that he did write a lot of what’s in the Pentateuch (Torah). There are places in the text where God says, ‘Hey, Moses. Write this down.’ So Moses definitely did some of the writing  in those five books.  

We also know that some of Genesis was written after Moses' death. For example:  

Abram traveled through the land as far as Shechem. There he set up camp beside the oak of Moreh. At that time, the area was inhabited by Canaanites. Genesis 12 v6  

So the Canaanites were no longer in the land when this was written. So it had to be after Moses' death, and even after the time of Joshua.  

As for the question about creation, this brings us ask: do we read it literally, or contextually?  

In the original Hebrew, the story of creation is written in the form of poetry. This is a poem that tells the story of how we came to be. It's a prophetic type of poetry, like what we find in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and  Isaiah: 

In that day, the wolf and the lamb will live together, the leopard will lie down with the baby goat, the calf and the yearling will be safe with the lion, and a little child will lead them all. Isaiah 11 v6 

A lot of prophecy is poetry. And if God can inspire writers to look to an unknowable future and express it as a work of art, can God not inspire a writer to look to an unseen past and express it as a work of art?  

The Bible is a collection of 66 different books, written by at least 40 different authors. Only about half of the books actually name their authors. ‘This is a letter from Paul, writing to Timothy...’ As for the rest? We have no idea. The authors are not named. So how much does that matter?  

Part of the mystery of the Bible is that we may not know the author's name, but we hear the author's voice.  

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The third question:

“The Ethiopian Bible identifies 12 commandments given to Moses. What are the other two?” 

I'm going to rewind to basics.  

The word canon (not the things on pirate ships that go ‘boom’ - those are cannon) comes from an ancient word that means 'measuring stick.’ Like a ruler.  

When we talk about the canon of scripture, we're talking about: 

The collection of writings recognized and respected as the authoritative expression of our faith and held to be sacred by the Church.  

But different Christian traditions measure the canon a little bit differently. 

• My tradition (Protestant or Reformation) holds a canon of 66 books.  
• Our Catholic brothers and sisters hold that there are 73 books in the canon: the same 66, plus seven others. There's nothing really wrong with those seven others. They're worth reading and have been valued by the Church for a very long time, but Protestants don't hold those seven to be sacred in the same way as the 66. 
• The Ethiopian Bible contains a canon of 88 books: the 66 plus 22 others. In the Ethiopian Bible, there are some books Protestants hold to be sacred, and other books we have questions about. We're not convinced that they have the same weight as the 66. 

The Ten Commandments recorded in the book of Exodus, which is in everybody's Bibles, are basically God's TLDR of a very complex Law. They boil down ‘to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, and love other people the way you love yourself.’  

The Ethiopian canon includes those commandments. But in one of the other books, there are 12 other commandments which are quite different. 

As an outsider, summarizing: some of those commandments say that God commands us to observe a 364-day year, because 364 is evenly divisible by 7, and that has significant implications and symbolism. Another principle in those 12 commandments is that angels, rather than being intermediaries and servants between God and humanity, are actually judges over humanity—a very different understanding of how our relationship with God is mediated. Another commandment says that God strictly forbids intermarrying with people from other tribes and races. (Part of the reason why that's a major question mark for me, is that Jesus' own family tree was multiracial.)  

I would say that those other writings can be very interesting. Those other writings can be educational. They can be helpful in understanding the world that they were written in.  

But please—first—read the 66 that are included in all reputable Christian canons of scripture. When you have a good handle on those, sure, dig into some of those other writings.  

Find out what they have to say. But always with a view to how they may be consistent or inconsistent with what the 66 have to say, because those are our starting point. 

Begin at the beginning.