Israel’s Rituals, God’s Needs, and the Covenant That Changed Everything (John Walton) Ep. #223

Dr. Dru Johnson (00:00)
What happens when a senior scholar changes their mind about Well, this week I’m joined again by Dr. John Walton. We got cut off because of technical reasons in our last interview and wanted to follow up with his new book where he talks about where he has changed his mind, where he has updated his views. We’re going to talk about methodology, what he thinks is most important and understand how we understand the scripture. And we’re going to talk about when he finally came over to my way of seeing things, actually not because of me at all.

for completely independent reasons to believe that the temple is probably not in creation, that that’s probably an overstated view. Anyways, lots to chew on stay tuned.

Dr. Dru Johnson (00:43)
so I was, I’ve been talking about paradigm shifts with my seminar, lately and like officially paradigm shifts like Cooney and Polanyi and paradigm shifts. And I wonder as a retired Hebrew Bible professor, have you ever gone through a paradigm shift? I mean, something past like your initial training where you

really radically see the same data very differently because of this new view.

John Walton (01:07)
Yes, it’s really happened twice. Once when I first recognized that creation could be considered not in material terms, but in functional, now I describe it as order terms, that was a paradigm shift. And then much more recently with regard to Genesis 3 when

I considered the idea that in Genesis, at least, it’s not really about sin at all. That it’s more about people seeking order and the ways that they do that. Certainly, besides those two, the idea that Adam and Eve are archetypes, which I came to a decade ago, was a sort of paradigm shift as well. So yes, they…

there have been such shifts.

Dr. Dru Johnson (02:07)
Yeah, and your new book, have a lot of these ideas laid out. And it’s very, I don’t want to say standard form, it’s becoming a standard form for you where you just have the question, like this is the question you’re getting and here’s my answer. It is, actually for someone in your stage of the career, it is actually a really easy way to read what you’re thinking because you can just say, this question comes up a lot and here’s what I think and here’s the contours of it.

John Walton (02:22)
Yeah.

Dr. Dru Johnson (02:36)
⁓ I wouldn’t normally recommend it for most people writing, but it works well in your situation. ⁓

John Walton (02:43)
Well,

I’ve been lecturing on this stuff for 15 years, and there are standard questions that arise, either in my presentations or emails that I receive or even reviews and responses of critics. There are standard questions, and people want to know what I have to say to those. So it made sense to kind of compile them together in a book like this.

Dr. Dru Johnson (03:07)
⁓ and I want to get to your view on creation in the temple eventually, cause that’s, that’s the one that’s like most meaningful to me, personally only in a, ⁓ it’s not, it’s not meaningful in the sense of, well, let’s just go to it right now, actually, cause I can’t help myself. The, have noticed a lot of people who are not biblical scholars have kind of constructed theologies out of the priesthood in the garden.

John Walton (03:13)
you

Dr. Dru Johnson (03:37)
ideas of the priesthood and ideas of the temple being in the garden, like specifically the temple. ⁓ And even some New Testament scholars have kind of followed suit where the Hebrew Bible scholars have gone in this direction. You, John Levinson, famously have kind of gone in this direction. ⁓ To the point where when I say, I’m not quite sure the temple is there. Like I can see sanctuary and sacredness in these ideas, but I’m not quite convinced that the temple itself is there and that might be reading it backwards or something like that.

you can see the blood drain from their face because they’ve kind of constructed an idea of what humans are in the world based on this. So I wonder what was your view? How have you nuanced it ⁓ more recently and what do you think that affects?

John Walton (04:22)
So we’ll start with the temple one. We could also talk, of course, the priesthood one as well, but we’ll start with the temple one. Early on I was challenged, and this is what I talk about in the new book, I was challenged that a temple not only designates sacred space, but it divides inside from outside.

that that’s one of the distinctives of what temple does. And of course, if you consider the whole cosmos to be a temple, you’ve got no inside and outside. And I thought that was a legitimate point. When I talked about it as a temple, I wasn’t talking about it as boundaries. I was talking about it as God’s presence. And I still would make that connection, that God’s presence among us is reflected in His rest among us, and the temple is the

architectural, conceptual representation of that. But I get the point that if the whole cosmos is viewed in this way, temple outstretches its metaphorical value. And so in that sense I’ve said, well, I’m very happy to think about this as establishing sacred space, that is God’s presence among us, without necessarily extending the temple metaphor to the concept of boundaries.

So that’s the nuancing that I’ve given it. I feel more comfortable with that. Of course, also part of that was that the account of day seven, the only rest it talks about is the ceasing part, Shabbat. And it doesn’t talk about the coming to rest part, nuach. And so I had to recognize that, acknowledge that. Of course, that’s true. If Genesis 1,

Dr. Dru Johnson (06:07)
Mmm. Right.

John Walton (06:20)
and two, wanted to make a point about God coming to rest, nuach, it could have used that term and it doesn’t. And that needs to be acknowledged. At the same time, you’ve got Exodus 20, which clearly pulls them together with Shabbat and nuach, and therefore makes that connection, and again, in that way demonstrates to us the Hebrew mind and the ideas that they connected. So I’m still…

very comfortable with seeing rest and presence in Genesis 2, but only tacitly, and therefore not literally explicit, but yet conceptually doable. So that’s NUANCING, and I think it’s called for. ⁓

Dr. Dru Johnson (07:07)
Yeah,

but it’s a controversial territory, as you well know, when you say anything about these texts in this part of the Bible. ⁓ people build theological castles on everything in this ground. ⁓ So yeah, wonder what, do you think that has any knock on impact to people who are thinking theologically about these texts? Or is this one of those things where you say, look guys, we need to make a shift. All you have to do is adjust these things all the way down.

John Walton (07:14)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I don’t follow what everybody says about, you know, building a theology of rest and temple. I know that it’s become a item. know people like, for instance, some people like what Greg Beale does with it and his mission of the church, and many have built off of that. Certainly some of those would probably go beyond what I would be comfortable with.

But again, I don’t try to track them to see kind of where everybody goes.

Dr. Dru Johnson (08:08)
He didn’t send them an email and say, you need to fix this. Michael Morales, another one who has constructed quite a robust. Yeah.

John Walton (08:09)
No, no, no.

Sure. And again,

both Michael, I mean, Michael acknowledges my influence on his work and Greg Beale and I, when he was writing that book, he was here teaching and we had a lot of conversations. And so to that extent, we certainly share some ideas, but we go different directions with them. And that’s kind of how things go in theological conversation.

Dr. Dru Johnson (08:30)
Okay, I did not that.

Yeah, ⁓ and so you brought up the idea of how Hebrews think. And, you know, this is an area that you’ve written quite a bit about. Before we get to how Hebrews think, ⁓ maybe you could say a bit about, that you do say in this new book, ⁓ how do ancient Near Eastern people think? ⁓ And, you know, we can pick the topic or most recently read about the netherworld or something like that.

And then there’s this question of the Hebrews doing something radically different, or is it just critical of, or it’s basically, you know, they’re just another piece of their world.

John Walton (09:20)
Well, we find a whole range. There are many ways that Israelites think like Babylonians and not like us, and that there’s no objection to that. God doesn’t try to change it. They live in their world. They’re part of their world. They think like people in their world. And that’s fine. God doesn’t change everything about the way that an Israelite thinks. There are other places where there’s overlap, but yet some differential.

So they’re living in the same world, they’re dealing with some of the same issues, but they might have slightly different opinions about them. And here we might find the Bible being subversive or even polemical on occasion. And that’s them kind of jostling with their cultural river and their worldview. And then of course there are other places where God says, you’re not supposed to think like them. And there are those issues that are usually theologically

⁓ packed and which Israel is supposed to think very differently. God does not have needs. Don’t think that way. Everybody else around you thinks that way. You can’t afford to think that way. And so there are those as well. So we run the whole spectrum and we can’t just make ⁓ generalized statements that Israel will always be different or that they will never be different. There’s a whole range of interactions.

Dr. Dru Johnson (10:40)
Yeah, you talk about these kinds of apologetic uses of these distinctions, which I am sensitive of. And I think everybody who works in biblical studies is very careful, typically, saying, ⁓ well, this is how they’re radically different than others. But I do find myself hitting walls where I’m like, this just is very different from everybody. They’re treating this particular law in such a different way that it’s hard to even say that it’s the same conceptuality going on outside of them.

turning the law back on itself in Lippit Ishtar or ⁓ Hammurabi. So I think what would be for you the most extreme examples where you think it’s just clear that they’re going a very different direction and they know they’re going a very different direction.

John Walton (11:27)
Well, I think the one I mentioned with God’s having needs. ⁓ They know it’s supposed to be different. They know they’re not supposed to think of Yahweh that way. They know that everyone else around them thinks that way. They know that the rituals are meant to feed that system, and they’re not supposed to use the rituals to feed that system. So even though they might have a very different way of thinking about what the rituals do, incredibly, the rituals look very similar.

Dr. Dru Johnson (11:31)
Alright.

Right.

Right.

John Walton (11:56)
the same thing that you mentioned with with laws it may be that we can find very clear examples where they’re just turning the legal ideas on their head from what other people around them think but they still think about law the same way that everybody else around thinks and so the conceptual world and yet the the individual diversions divergences from it ⁓ are all important to keep in mind

Dr. Dru Johnson (12:26)
Yeah, I think that, mean, I’m okay. So this is now a therapy session for me. I’m, you know, I’m, working again, I’m working again on ritual and re ritualization as ritual anthropologists call it. ⁓ and I do have this after active question, ⁓ that actually Roy Gane has made me think quite a bit a lot. I don’t know if you know Roy, but, are, are, ⁓ you know, are Israel’s rituals.

John Walton (12:32)
Yeah.

yeah, Roy’s a good friend.

Dr. Dru Johnson (12:53)
Are they unique in the ancient world? along this one axis is I can’t find anybody else ⁓ so far. maybe you know of someone you should tell me right now, if you do. ⁓ This idea is in order that you might know, in order that your generations might know to a ritual, like do this ritual in order that you might know. So Passover would obviously count even the stones, the Memorial stones of Joshua. So coat is that your generations you know, do this.

John Walton (13:04)
Hahaha

Dr. Dru Johnson (13:22)
camp in Sukkos for seven days so that your children may know that I made you to camp in Sukkos. ⁓ that does seem to be a new edge. And it also ties into what you’re talking about where like, man, all of these rituals, it’s not that they’re just doing food rituals, but it says it’s going to be a pleasing aroma. It all sounds like you’re feeding God, right? That the fire is eating up God except for, yeah, except for thinking, you know, thinking alive right now on this topic is

John Walton (13:43)
The table.

Dr. Dru Johnson (13:50)
That you may know then becomes this new angle that does kind of take it out of the, this is not to feed God. This is so that you may understand something differently. That makes sense.

John Walton (13:59)
Mm-hmm. No, that does. And I think that goes back to the formal relationship in the covenant that Israel and Yahweh have, which again, as far as I know, is still unique in the ancient world. A god or a god’s making a covenant with a group of people, formalized and built in the way that this is, there’s just nothing like it.

lots of what we see, it’s not because God has needs that Israel does these things. It’s rather because of the relationship that exists between them. And so I think of the sacrifices as relationship building events, not need meeting events. Again, the events look very similar, which is really a risky procedure.

Dr. Dru Johnson (14:46)
They do. They smell very similar.

John Walton (14:52)
to keep the ritual looking the same but trying to give it a different meaning is really a risky procedure.

Dr. Dru Johnson (15:00)
Yeah, I don’t think I had thought about it along that axis before, but it really does. mean, what you’re saying, if it’s true, it really does mean the conceptuality that you bring to the event actually determines something about what you’re doing more than the, than the feeding event itself.

John Walton (15:15)
Yeah. Yeah, well, we

might see the same things. know, various denominations all do the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper, but they have mental images that are different from one another. And for some denominations, if you don’t share their mental image, don’t come forward and take the Eucharist, whereas others are a little more open to it. But that’s really the same idea. The action’s the same, but the mental framework is different.

Dr. Dru Johnson (15:29)
And certainly.

Yeah. So you seem to be pushing in the direction of, the mental, you know, cause I can imagine some people would say, and I might even be tempted to say something like, just do the ritual and then let the framework build as you go. Right. Versus I certainly would have friends and colleagues who would say, no, no, you don’t do the ritual unless you understand what you’re doing.

John Walton (16:08)
Well, again, in certain denominations that have closed communion, they discourage you from participating if you don’t share the framework. They don’t want you to participate and develop the framework. Who would ever come up with that framework? ⁓ you know, on their own.

Dr. Dru Johnson (16:25)
Right. Yeah.

so thinking back then to, ⁓ to these ideas that have been shifting in your mind. going back to the big question of what, kinds of paradigm shifts you’ve experienced, I wonder, ⁓ what do you think makes, ⁓ for cognitive flexibility? I mean, especially the issue you’ve written quite a few books. everything you’ve, I shouldn’t say everything. A lot of what you think is out there in print.

John Walton (16:54)
Yeah. Some people would say I don’t have a filter on that. I just print everything I think.

Dr. Dru Johnson (16:54)
⁓ And then.

Right. Yeah.

Well, I mean, ⁓ so it’s out there, but it, and you’re in a position where you have a lot of influence because a lot of people have appreciated your thinking and it’s, it’s put them down certain paths, but it also, I’m thinking, okay, if, if, someone in that same trajectory, they’re writing a lot, they’ve got their ideas out there. People are starting to pay attention to them. ⁓ it seems like you would still want to advocate for some cognitive flexibility. ⁓ and I guess the question is how would you coach people to sit?

say, well, not so fast, or maybe write less, or space it out, or what would be your advice?

John Walton (17:34)
No. I wouldn’t do things differently than what I’ve done. ⁓ Obviously, I’ve changed my mind on a few things. And that means things that are out there in print under my name are not always things that I think now, or the way that I think now. But the point is that we’re all growing and learning, and my commitment is to the evidence. And if your commitment is to the evidence, you have to acknowledge that at times there will be new evidence.

Dr. Dru Johnson (17:39)
Okay.

John Walton (18:02)
whether that’s in actual texts or insights about the texts or questions that somebody asked that you hadn’t thought to ask or new analysis of texts, there’s going to be new evidence. And if your commitment is to the evidence, your commitment has to be to cognitive flexibility because confronted with new evidence, I’d better be willing to change my mind else I’m really not committed to the evidence.

Dr. Dru Johnson (18:27)
Yeah, and so that issue of commitment to the evidence, I will just caricature something really quickly and we can admit that it’s a caricature, but I have had friends and colleagues who almost seem like they’re saying something like this, unless you understand the ancient Near Eastern backgrounds of the biblical text, you don’t understand the biblical text. I do not hear you making that claim. ⁓

Maybe you have in the past, I don’t know. But that seems to be a very common claim where I want to make some room, and I think you do as well, that the church has understood the text, but there is actually, there’s more to go, right? And this, this new evidence. So I wonder where you find yourself weighing the ancient Near Eastern background that truly does illuminate a lot of things. You know, now we can say they probably took this idea for granted because everybody thought this in their world. ⁓

John Walton (19:21)
Yeah.

Dr. Dru Johnson (19:22)
But how strong does the Ancient Near Eastern background ⁓ play a role in the shifting evidence versus, I know you’ve said a lot about what you think the text is doing and what it’s not doing, but ⁓ if someone comes along and says, I’ve never read a single page of Ancient Near Eastern history, I don’t know what any of this stuff is, do I know what the text says?

John Walton (19:44)
Ancient Near Eastern literature, backgrounds is a tool like any other tool that we use. We could say, it matter if you really know Hebrew? Well, lots of places, no, your English translation is going to do just fine. There’s not a lot of controversy here. Not a lot. The detailed analysis of Hebrew text is going to get you. But other places, wow, it really makes a difference. You need to know what that word means. And that means you can’t just settle in on an English translation.

There isn’t even a legitimate English translation. so, but again, that’s case by case. And I think of Ancient Near East as the same way. It’s a case by case. There are many texts that you can understand perfectly well without the Ancient Near East. Some of them you might understand just a little bit more if you have the Ancient Near East, but it’s not really going to change your interpretation. But there are those occasions where, yeah, this will totally revolutionize how I think about this passage.

and there it becomes critical. And in those passages I would say that yes, without the Ancient Near East, people for thousands of years have misunderstood this text because they didn’t have that information. But that’s the rarity, but it’s there.

Dr. Dru Johnson (21:00)
And if I read you correctly in this new book, which reflects a lot of your thinking and other books is it’s the whole of scripture that contains the message of God. Not it’s, doesn’t hang on any one. Yeah.

John Walton (21:11)
Right.

Right, so I don’t say we have to take each of those, I call them the bits, a narrative, a law, a proverb, a psalm, a prophecy, and drop them into the me box. If we’re doing that and we misunderstand one of those passages, you might really goof up. Okay, but my alternate metaphor is that I want to take each of those bits and push it up into the God box. And I’m responding to scripture by responding to that whole profile

Dr. Dru Johnson (21:27)
Mm-hmm.

John Walton (21:38)
that all those bits built in the God box. And so in that sense again, can, even if you don’t understand some of the parts, even if you don’t understand the sons of God and daughters of men and the Nephilim and all of that, your God box is still going to be largely intact from the things that are pretty transparent. And you’re responding to the God box, you’re participating in God’s story, and those are the things that really matter.

Dr. Dru Johnson (22:03)
Yeah. it’s a good illustration. ⁓ the last question here is along the lines of, well, what exactly counts as evidence? ⁓ I do not see you using a lot of literary structure in, your evidence box. ⁓ so like Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg and those don’t seem to feature heavily in the way you think about the text. Do you think

you know, formal structures, know, narrative, the conflict that comes to resolution should constrain the meaning of the text or ⁓ obviously Hebrew parallelism has its own, its own thing going on. But yeah, how much does the actual, the particulars of literary structure feature in what you think is evidence?

John Walton (22:44)
I believe that literary structure and rhetorical devices and all of those literary aspects are again one of the tools in the toolkit. It’s not the only tool in the toolkit, just like lexical analysis is not and cultural analysis is not. They’re all tools we have in the toolkit and we have to use all of them to the best that we can. I find a lot of benefit in literary analysis and especially in understanding genre and how it works. But it extends to literary structures and rhetorical devices.

And those are all things we have to take into account because they regulate how the communication is shaped and how it’s taking place. And if it has that impact, we need to be aware of it. And so I think it’s another one of the tools. Again, it’s not my only tool in the toolkit, but it’s one that I want to be aware of and that I want to use to the best of my ability.

Dr. Dru Johnson (23:36)
Well, Dr. John Walton, thank you for coming back to finish an interview that we started a couple of weeks ago. And we had a few where you went to Europe and I’m now in the UK. So we’ve had a lot in between. ⁓ but I appreciate you coming on to tackle these big picture questions and give us the details that make sense to you as.

John Walton (23:54)
Well, thanks for the opportunity. I always love talking about this stuff and I hope people find some thoughtful stimulation when they encounter it.