Unlocking The Deep Structures of Scripture: The Bible’s Unified Message (Joshua Berman) Ep. #221

Dru Johnson (00:00)
Okay, so I’ve heard you, I think you’re the first person who used the phrase deep structures in scripture ⁓ or deep structures in the biblical literature, which really stuck with me. In fact, I think I use it now in your honor as how I think about the Bible. What do you mean by deep structures and how do you find them without dropping mines deep into the waters to blow up and see what floats to the top?

How do you find deep structures?

Joshua Berman (00:30)
Wow, I mean, you know, I think if you come to the biblical text as I do ⁓ with a ⁓ sympathetic view of its unity, by that I mean within a book and even from book to book, ⁓ that whether the entire Bible was written by a single agent or not, that’s not the issue, but rather that there is a kind of cultural

continuity and a literary continuity and that these works are reverberating and influencing and being deliberately invoked ⁓ from one generation, from one passage, from one book to another ⁓ gives us the inevitable result that there will be patterns that appear over and over. ⁓ And then once you are

committed or open to viewing the Bible in that way, they really begin to jump out at you. ⁓ So, you know, I might take as an example, ⁓ famine followed by ⁓ abandoning the land and then returning to the land. So this is, you know, this is ⁓ Abraham and then this is the Jewish people, you know, as one example.

you know, doctoral dissertation advisor, ⁓ Ed Greenstein, Professor Ed Greenstein, a great scholar, ⁓ notes that ⁓ the motif of the ⁓ abandoned hero, like a hero who has to run away from where he was born and then come back, ⁓ that’s Jacob, that’s Moses, that’s David, this comes up over and over again. ⁓

or ⁓ prophetic call narratives ⁓ that a person who’s going to be a spiritual leader of the people, usually a prophet, has some type of epiphany and a struggle with the task that he’s given, ⁓ comes up again and again. And often it’s not only motival, issues of motif that recur, but if you are proficient in the Hebrew,

then you see deliberate echoing of terms. And again, within a book, from book to book, and this just becomes a very rich way of reading. I think that this was, you know, this is far less prevalent in modern literature because I think that ⁓ in biblical times, they had to find a way to get the biggest bang for the buck. What do mean by that? You know, they weren’t able to publish a big fat book like this. You know what I mean?

⁓ So if people are, if the assumption was at least that learned people ⁓ were proficient in the stories, then they would have this repository of terms and of motifs that they would quickly ⁓ access every time they saw something similar just by saying a single word, suddenly it’s like you open a whole window to that earlier story. I that goes on in wholesale fashion all across the Bible.

Dru Johnson (03:49)
Hmm.

Yeah, one of those words for me would be fruitful whenever I see pre right. It fires off lots of triggers. What would be some for you?

Joshua Berman (03:59)
question. Yeah.

wow, mean, it’s usually, you know, what association does a particular word have? You know, it might not be one word that appears from place to place, there are other motifs that I mentioned before, but it’s inevitable if I’m reading a passage and there’s a word there that is ⁓ somewhat striking and it only appears in a couple of other places, I’m beginning to think about wow, what connection is being made here?

Dru Johnson (04:31)
Yeah, it strikes me too that the ⁓ Torah tends to use a more limited vocabulary, ⁓ at least in the narrative passages, ⁓ where the Psalms kind of expand, the poetic material expands the vocabulary. I know Robert Alter used to complain about this, that these stories are famously laconic, and also ⁓ he would complain that English translators essentially did this disservice.

Joshua Berman (04:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Dru Johnson (05:01)
by constantly rendering synonyms in English rather than just showing you know it just says dirt, dirt, dirt every single time it’s just dirt, dirt.

Joshua Berman (05:07)
Right, right. This is one of

the great advantages to ⁓ his commentary that he is careful to preserve the same root in the Hebrew across its various usages. He will do that in the English. The inevitable sacrifice is that it might not read as smoothly, but if you are looking for these types of connections between stories, between passages, you’ll find that in his translation.

Some say prior to Altar, the translation that did this the best was the King James Version, actually, which is pretty consistent in how it translates things.

Dru Johnson (05:42)
Hmm.

Yeah.

If you ⁓ speak Elizabethan English as well, that helps. ⁓ Which is difficult for some people. ⁓ So when you’re, you know, I think there’s a distinct advantage, not only do you read Hebrew, but you speak it natively. I wonder as an Israeli, if that, you ever find that that interferes where the modern sense ⁓ is, you feel like you might be projecting or you have that fear?

Joshua Berman (05:54)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely,

absolutely. Yeah, yeah, there’s a whole bunch of words that I have to tell my class folks. This doesn’t mean what you think it means. Okay? I’ll give you just one example of that. Okay? There’s a Hebrew word, chesed, often translated into English as a ⁓ kindness. ⁓ Often it’ll be translated, I think even in English translations of the standard English translations of the Bible. ⁓

Dru Johnson (06:20)
Hmm.

Joshua Berman (06:43)
God’s grace or kindness ⁓ with us, his chesed, ⁓ in modern Hebrew to do a good deed for another person is called an act of chesed. But in the Bible it really means to be loyal. It really means to be loyal. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (07:01)
Hmm.

Yeah, that’s so chesed in modern Hebrew is more like a mitzvah. More in that connotation. Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Berman (07:09)
Yeah, an act of kindness, an act of grace, to

use a Christian term, but that’s really what it is, but not in the biblical Hebrew. And that’s always a fascinating thing, to uncover what it meant, why it meant that, why things changed. I love it. That’s fun stuff. Always fun stuff.

Dru Johnson (07:15)
Yeah.

Hmm. Yeah.

I mean, it’s interesting. When I first became a Christian, kind of out of a non-Christian background, ⁓ or ⁓ I had a very weird relationship with Christianity, but I started reading the Bible and I was going to a church and they talked about grace this and that’s God’s grace and grace that. ⁓ I could not figure out what this word meant because it was used so many different ways in what we call Christianese, right? ⁓ So yeah, when I discovered

Joshua Berman (07:47)
So interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dru Johnson (07:54)
and chesed, well in Greek you get the ch beginning at the beginning of both of those. ⁓ It was very like, you could actually trace the trajectory, the connotation, the denotation. These are being used in very specific ways, yeah. ⁓

Joshua Berman (08:07)
Yeah.

Dru I have to stop. I want to throw something in and ⁓ if it works for the podcast, you’ll keep it in. So I we at Bar Ilan, we have a an overseas program, an overseas program that draws largely ⁓ Christian students from across the globe. And I love it when they give a reading of the text that I know I would not have thought of.

Dru Johnson (08:16)
Okay.

Joshua Berman (08:34)
and that it’s coming from their Christian theological orientation without anything necessarily Christological to it. So I had recently one such example. We were studying ⁓ Second Samuel, ⁓ chapter 9, where David ⁓ feels this deep need to ⁓ satisfy the covenant or play his…

Dru Johnson (08:41)
Right, right.

Joshua Berman (09:03)
fulfill his role in his covenant with Jonathan, who’s no longer alive, by doing right by Jonathan’s lame son, Mephibosheth And a student of mine from Costa Rica, a Christian student, he said to me, yes, David here is taking the grace that he got from God in chapter seven, when God said to him, I am building for you a kingdom.

Dru Johnson (09:27)
Right.

Joshua Berman (09:32)
And so now David feels the need to give the gift onward. And he’s doing that, therefore, from Mephibosheth I that’s beautiful. And that comes from that student’s ⁓ Christian ⁓ understanding of divine grace in a way that we don’t really have, I have to say, in Judaism. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (09:38)
Right.

Right.

Right. interesting.

Yeah, I have almost the equal and opposite problem where I’m trying to get them to quit bringing their theological insights in because they’re constantly over-reading theology into the text. But that is actually a good, I would call that a restrained interpretation. Yeah, that’s great. ⁓ Excellent. So ⁓ those are examples of kind of linguistic issues that we can… ⁓

Joshua Berman (09:59)
huh.

huh.

It’s good. It was good.

Dru Johnson (10:17)
that being a native Hebrew speaker, you have to deal with those on an interesting way, which no English speaker has to deal with. ⁓ I wonder on the flip side.

How much ⁓ an English-only audience, I mean, this would be true of Spanish-only, somebody who has no access to the original languages, because you work with lot of Christians, both in Israel and other places, you’ve taught a lot of Christians. Where do you find them kind of faltering a little bit when they’re stuck in their own translation and they don’t really understand how the Hebrew works?

Joshua Berman (10:48)
Well, you know, I mean, I often, ⁓ I love, I’ll tell you a way that I love to teach. I think everybody should be teaching this way today, honestly, especially in an age where our attention span is ever shrinking. I love to begin a lecture by giving my students ⁓ the text or a piece of the text that we’re going to be focusing on. And I split them into study pairs or what this is what we do in the Yeshiva ⁓ before the lecture on a piece of the Talmud.

Dru Johnson (11:00)
Hmm.

Right.

Joshua Berman (11:17)
⁓ Students will pair off and read the material together and think about it. Sometimes they’re given guiding questions by the lecturer and then they come to class super prepared and super loaded and then the discussions just explode and they’re amazing. ⁓ So I will often give the students, you know, an assignment to read the text and they read the text in their in their native languages. And then, you know, I might draw oftentimes, you know, how does

Dru Johnson (11:29)
Right.

Joshua Berman (11:45)
How is this being translated in your Korean translation? How is this being translated in your Spanish? And then they say, and then we see that it’s different. ⁓ then that’s a great way to talk about whatever key word there is determining the text.

Dru Johnson (11:49)
Thank you.

Thanks again.

Do they, when you have this chavrutah, would it be chavrutot system, guess, do you, does it ever get as noisy as it does ⁓ in a yeshiva? Yeah, I mean, yeah. It’s, they don’t just talk about the passage, they argue about the passage, Which gives you great insights. ⁓ Okay, I want to, ⁓

Joshua Berman (12:12)
no, no, no, they’re too inhibited. So I don’t know, a little bit, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes.

Yeah.

Dru Johnson (12:30)
put you into conversation with a few passages and hear how you think through them. And again, thinking maybe a little bit more macroscopically than microscopically about what these passages are doing, how they function in the biblical literature. I think feel free to, you don’t have to say what different scholars have said, you can just say what you think is going on in these passages and why. And I’m sure you probably have various layers that you think about these passages.

But going back to that issue of the unity of the text and unity within a book, think most people, even English readers when I walk them through, they see Genesis as a clear problem on this front. ⁓ Because you read Genesis 1 through 11 and it feels very different than the rest of the book. And then sometimes if they’re really reading closely and asking questions, they feel like the end of the book feels very different as well with the Joseph narratives. And so you get this kind of natural breaking up into three parts.

So you don’t have to make an argument for unity, but how do you see something like Genesis 1 through 11 functioning and what’s the structural elements that you see played out elsewhere?

Joshua Berman (13:36)
Wow, mean, you what’s so interesting is that, many have noted, you can divide up Genesis by the opening phrase, ele tol dot ‘X’ These are the descendants of ‘X’. And ⁓ that coinage, that phrase appears already, I believe, in chapter two, and then appears another four five times at the beginning of different intersections throughout the book. ⁓ So that’s

Dru Johnson (13:56)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Berman (14:03)
that in no way takes away from the very ⁓ accurate observation that you may Dru that, wow, just generically the genre of 1 to 11 seems different than later. the Joseph novella seems to have a style of its own. There might be some stylistic differences and I think other differences too. ⁓ But this is where, again, my own ⁓ predilection for viewing unity.

comes in. Here, I’ll give you another example from within Genesis that shows me that it’s really all unified. In chapter 48, when ⁓ Joseph brings his sons to Jacob for blessing, ⁓ if you know the Hebrew well and you’ve read Genesis really well, then what you can see is that entire narrative, right? It’s the famous story,

Jacob is now old and blind. Joseph brings his two sons. excuse me, Jacob doesn’t really know who’s who and puts his hands out and then Joseph has to switch the hands and tell them who’s the older and who’s the younger. And then the aged patriarch bestows his blessing and departs this world. That whole narrative of Genesis 48 is rife and replete with

allusions to every scene of blessing earlier in the book of Genesis in perfect reverse order. As if this is like the culmination of all those different stories of blessing.

Dru Johnson (15:33)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Can you give us a teaser? So how is it connected to maybe one? mean, because there would be an obvious connection to another old man who is dying and blind and has a reversal. yeah, the actual words themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Berman (15:51)
Yes, okay, so that’s one of them, but I’m just saying like the words here. I’m just opening it up. It’s the words. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

It’s all in the words of the Hebrew. Yeah, I mean some of the images too, but the words, yeah, the words, yeah. Yeah.

Edit out the page turning here. One second.

Dru Johnson (16:07)
Yeah.

No, this is this is live. I go there myself.

Joshua Berman (16:11)
Yeah, right, right.

Yeah, you know, so starting with ⁓ Israel who sits up in his bed, that’s just like Isaac did, and Isaac was blind. ⁓ Phrases like, ⁓ El Shaddai appeared to me in Luz in the land of Canaan. I’m at the end of verse three. And he said to me, ⁓ behold, I will make you fruitful and multiply, and I will give you…

Dru Johnson (16:21)
Right.

Hmm.

Joshua Berman (16:41)
multiple nations. Well, those all, you know, those all echo earlier blessings in some ways. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (16:47)
Yeah.

Beginning in chapter one, God blessed them saying, be fruitful and multiply. And then continuing in the Abrahamic covenant.

Joshua Berman (16:53)
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

yeah or you know ⁓ what does he say that with my my sword ⁓ and my bow

what it says here, the very last verse of 48, and I shall give them an extra portion above their brother, brothers, which I, which I took with my, which I took from the Amorites with my sword and my bow. Okay. You see that 4822 with my sword and my bow, but

Dru Johnson (17:31)
Yeah, yeah.

Joshua Berman (17:36)
When you look in the stories of Ishmael, Ishmael is the one who has a sword and who has a bow. And so when Jacob says, my sword and my bow, he is appropriating, co-opting the blessing which had initially been for Ishmael is now his blessing, things like that.

Dru Johnson (17:42)
⁓

Hmm,

yeah, and maybe even reinforcing the word to, sorry, Rebecca, which the older shall serve the younger there. Yeah, yeah, it’s beautiful. I think you’re making the case here that…

Joshua Berman (18:06)
Mm-hmm.

Dru Johnson (18:15)
Yeah, superficially there’s different things going on in these three different parts of Genesis, but as you look under the hood, you see all these strands that seem to be pulling from the very beginning all the way through. What do you make of that just functionally? Like, why? Why all of these threads? Why when you look deeper, it’s an interwoven tapestry, but what’s the point of that, if you think about for the reader, what does that do for us?

Joshua Berman (18:23)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Why what?

So as I say, I think on one level, it’s the way in which the author is able to communicate a huge amount of ideas in very few words, because not everything needs to be spelled out. I just say, oh, sword, bow, and it’s up to you to then know, oh, he’s just opened the Ishmael window. Aha. OK, so I think that that’s one aspect of it.

Dru Johnson (18:54)
Mm-mm. Yeah.

Joshua Berman (19:12)
And I think that maybe there’s a deeper theological, this is amusing that I’m doing on the spot, amusing that ⁓ in all of reality, there’s kind of the surface of what you see, but then maybe there are things that are going on underneath that are deeper, that cross space and time, that maybe God’s hand works in such a way as well.

Dru Johnson (19:19)
Right.

Huh.

Joshua Berman (19:42)
Part of it, yeah.

Dru Johnson (19:43)
Yeah, even human relationship, there’s always something going on under the hood. Yeah. That’s great. Okay, we’re off to a great start. I love this issue, ⁓ which I always say it’s very economical writing, but that it really, this huge amount of information, it creates a world, it gives you some linguistic tools, and I always say nothing gets thrown to the side, so pay attention to every detail, because it’s going to come up again and again again.

Joshua Berman (20:09)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dru Johnson (20:11)
⁓ And especially if you’re talking about people who are hearing this text who aren’t reading it as well, you actually need those linguistic tools to help you kind of even track. And when people say, I read the Old Testament, but I got so bored, I would say, well, start listening to it. Because start listening to it and try to figure out what it means. And then you’ll be thankful for the repetition. The repetition will actually help.

Joshua Berman (20:21)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Right, right. What I often

do with, I do this also with people who don’t know a word of Hebrew. Like when I visit Christian institutions, ⁓ we’ll take a little passage, a little narrative passage, and I will split them up into study pairs, chavutot as we say in the world of the yeshiva, and I’ll say to I want you to read this passage together, the two of you, and I want you to each begin to ask each other questions about it. And that slows down the reading, and that sharpens, you know,

Dru Johnson (20:40)
Hmm.

Hmm.

that’s interesting.

Joshua Berman (21:03)
getting people to notice things.

Dru Johnson (21:04)
I like that. I’m going to steal that one from you. Excellent. OK, so let’s move on to ⁓ another ⁓ bit of parallelism and parallelism at a very macro level, which is something like Sodom and Gomorrah. We have a foreigner who comes into a village and then ⁓

Joshua Berman (21:06)
Uh-huh.

Dru Johnson (21:24)
the entire village descends, or all the men in the village descend in order to do violence to this foreigner. And then there’s a noble person who knows what’s gonna happen and ushers them away. This happens in Genesis 19, and it becomes, even for Jesus, this becomes the reason for judgment, what judgment is gonna be like for this kind of evil. ⁓

But then, judges, like so many things in Judges, it just gets sadder and sadder and sadder. ⁓ And then in Judges, it happens again, but it’s Israelites this time who are doing it to a Levite. ⁓ again, the wording in the Hebrew, it’s almost cut and paste at points. ⁓ Almost the exact same words are used to construct these stories. So besides the obvious that, ⁓

Joshua Berman (22:05)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (22:13)
the problem of Sodom and Gomorrah is now that kind of violence is in Judges 19. What do you make of that reuse of the actual language?

Joshua Berman (22:26)
Yeah, so obviously, ⁓ well, my assumption is that the book of Judges comes after the book of Genesis. ⁓ If for no other reason, and this is an important ⁓ recent development that people should know about, ⁓ some viewers or listeners might be familiar that we have periodization of biblical Hebrew, typically classical or early biblical Hebrew, the Hebrew that we find in the Torah, the Pentateuch, and in the what’s called the Deuteronomy.

history, the early prophets, earlier prophets, the narrative prophets, as opposed to late biblical Hebrew, which we find in post-exilic works, ⁓ Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, Chronicles. There’s been a recent development within this kind of ⁓ linguistic history of ⁓ periodization of biblical Hebrew that ⁓ the linguistic profile of the Pentateuch, of the Torah,

is the earliest of any book that we have ⁓ in the Bible, so that it’s actually a little earlier than what we generally call classical biblical Hebrew. And so therefore that’s what allows me on a purely scholarly level to say that, wow, if we have a story in Genesis and we have the same story in Judges, there are probably at least a dozen, no less, a dozen markers of this ⁓ early, early biblical Hebrew.

Dru Johnson (23:37)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Joshua Berman (23:51)
that we can find in the story in Genesis 19 that will be absent in Judges 21. Okay, so once I come with the assumption that the author of ⁓ the concubine, Ekebia, is invoking ⁓ the story of Sodom and Lot, Lot and his daughter and everything that goes on there. ⁓

Right, so towards what end? And always, I think always, the parallels that are drawn are designed to challenge the reader to see what is similar and what is dissimilar. ⁓ It certainly comes on you know, on probably an immediate level. It comes to say, wow, gosh, you know, the Israelites, have descended so far. How far have they descended? Well, they’ve descended so far that they are like Sodom and Gomorrah, okay? ⁓

In fact, I think that the phrase Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the most oft-repeated phrases ⁓ in all of the Bible ⁓ as a of a reference point. Stories that are referred, that is one of the top referents that we have in the Bible. And so it fits in with that. But then there will be ways in which ⁓

Dru Johnson (25:00)
Right.

Joshua Berman (25:13)
you can see that the Israelites are now like Sodom and Gomorrah, probably ways in which they are worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. It then, you know, challenges you to go back and reread the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Maybe you see new things there as well. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (25:26)
Hmm.

yeah. And when you’re reading the law, you will pick up in the legal material, like, this is the exact opposite of how you’re supposed to treat foreigners who wander into your village, right? ⁓ So it sparks off, like, what’s so wrong beyond the surface of it?

Joshua Berman (25:38)
Okay. huh. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Yeah, you know, it isn’t just, you know,

violence and terrible things like that. It’s also a question of, I mean, what’s really going on in Genesis 19 is issues of group identity, who’s in, who’s out, what is the meaning of being out, okay? And then realizing, wow, this issue of in and out is what Israelite tribes are doing to one another. It isn’t just, wow, you know, there was a rape there and there’s a rape here. That’s true too.

Dru Johnson (25:58)
Hmm. Yeah.

Right.

Hmm

Joshua Berman (26:15)
But it’s, you know, these codes of how do we determine who is in and who is out.

Dru Johnson (26:20)
Hmm. Yeah. And judges is certainly… Yeah. Yeah. It is a tragedy. ⁓ Okay. I think Joseph and Daniel, have a similar situation where you have ⁓ thematically… I don’t think linguistically there’s as much connection going on between Joseph and Daniel, but you have two guys who can interpret dreams in the court and they do so in a very similar way. ⁓ That’s a strange one.

Joshua Berman (26:40)
huh. Right. Right. Right.

Dru Johnson (26:49)
Why does Daniel look so much like Joseph, maybe less Abraham or something?

Joshua Berman (26:52)
Right. Right. ⁓

I haven’t done much about that, so I’m going to pass on that one. Though the question is an obvious and good one. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (26:56)
Okay, you’re gonna punt? That’s fine, great, great. ⁓

Yeah, yeah. well, it was a real question for me because I haven’t thought that much about it either. Okay, this one ⁓ in the book of Exodus, we’ll do two on the book of Exodus. It starts out in Exodus one through four. And I think it’s fair to say that every hero in Exodus one through four, Moses gets a mixed review here. ⁓ But the ones who are unabashedly doing the right thing, even against the legal reasoning of the day, right? They’re ordered to do something and they…

Joshua Berman (27:08)
Right. Right.

Dru Johnson (27:33)
they judge that order to be wrong and act against it, is women. ⁓ And then Zipporah comes in and kind of saves Moses as a foreigner who understands that he has a covenant obligation as well. ⁓ So what do you make of what everybody loves to say is a patriarchal world written by elite men? ⁓ Why are they putting all of these women at the beginning of Exodus? Besides the obvious, which we could say is, maybe that’s just how the story went.

Joshua Berman (28:01)
Right. ⁓ You know, I think ⁓ the story of the Exodus is about upending ⁓ existing and entrenched social orders. ⁓ And therefore, what better way than to champion the bottom rung of the ladder, ⁓ which often is women. ⁓ But there could be many ways to parse this. ⁓ I always like, I really like, one of my favorite chapters is Exodus 2.

Dru Johnson (28:18)
Hmm.

Joshua Berman (28:31)
right, begins with the story of the rescue of baby Moses and from there moves on to ⁓ Moses ⁓ going out to his brethren and then seeing the first day the Egyptians smiting the Israelite and then the second day the two Israelites going at it against one another, culminating in the story of Moses at the well with the daughters of Jethro. And I just love the role how gender plays itself out

this story. That what you see is the following is that in the first episode, the rescue of baby Moses, ⁓ you have ⁓ many figures that are there. They’re all women. In other words, the men are conspicuously absent. ⁓ Moses’s father is not in the story. Pharaoh is not in the story. Though you do have ⁓ the sister and you have Pharaoh’s daughter and you have her maidservants.

that there are paintings of all these women, there’s several really amazing paintings that all give very interesting interpretations from European masterpieces about this story. And what you see is that the first story is that it’s all women, all women, except for Moses, but he’s not really much of a player in that story, right? He’s too little. Then in the second story, when Moses goes out, you see just the opposite, that you see it’s all men, right? Moses is now big, and he sees an Egyptian man smiting an Israelite man.

and then two Israelite men smiting one another, and then Pharaoh who wants to smite ⁓ Moses. And what you see here is how gender is kind of upended because in the first story, what’s really happening is that all these women are putting their neck out. Every single one of them is complicit in saving this Israelite baby who by royal fiat should be drowned. And so they are all actually demonstrating bravery, but at the same time, they are demonstrating what

Dru Johnson (30:12)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Joshua Berman (30:27)
what verse 6 says there, vatachmol alav, she had compassion on him. Right? So this ultimate virtue of women of, you know, pity and compassion, but melded together with true bravery. Whereas in the second story where it’s all men, well, why are they all killing each other? Because they’re all threatened by one another. They’re all afraid of each other. And so, you know, it’s just so fascinating how you can see you have the best of women in their compassion, which expresses itself in bravery.

Dru Johnson (30:32)
Hmm.

Joshua Berman (30:57)
And then you have all these men who are very violent, but that’s an expression of their fear. And then you have the third story, which is Moses at the well and the girls come home and their report to Jethro, say, they say an Egyptian man delivered us from the shepherds. And he also went and drew water and gave water to the sheep.

Why do they say that? In other words, you would expect they would say, wow, Abba, daddy, wow, there was this guy and he saved us. mean, that, I mean, that afterwards he gave water to the sheep. Why is that worthy of note? And I think that what they’re saying is that they see all of these aspects in Moses. That on the one hand, he’s a guy, you know, he can go rock them, sock them with the best of them, right? But what makes him amazing is that he’s not just a typical Rambo.

Dru Johnson (31:35)
Right.

you

Right.

Joshua Berman (31:55)
He’s actually got a big heart. And when he’s finished with settling the account with the shepherds, wow, he then went and took water and went and gave water to the sheep. He’s the best of men and the best of women. So this is how gender becomes a very rich issue in that story.

Dru Johnson (32:14)
Okay, while I have you in this story, one more question that has puzzled me a little bit, I think. ⁓ The same phrase is used, and the pharaoh sought to kill, or smite Moses, and then chapter four, on their way back in, exact same phrase, and Adonai sought to kill Moses. ⁓ And so you have Moses’ life in danger twice, once from pharaoh, once from God himself. What do you make of that?

Joshua Berman (32:31)
⁓ interesting, right? Interesting. I

hadn’t thought about that. ⁓ Moses has a lot of enemies. Yeah, I mean, look, that whole story there in chapter four, you know, ⁓ as there’s a phrase in Hebrew, the sequestered is greater than the revealed, meaning, you know, there are more questions than good answers.

Dru Johnson (32:43)
You

Hmm.

Right, right.

Joshua Berman (32:59)
from that story,

so I’m not really sure what to say about it.

Dru Johnson (33:01)
Yeah, OK, good. Well, then I feel better about being a little perplexed about it. ⁓ Yeah. OK. And then ⁓ for our last one, before we run out of time here, I would love to hear ⁓ what you think the purpose of poetry embedded in narrative is. And the example I came up with was Exodus 14 and 15, which is just, for all kinds of reasons, a very interesting ⁓ interplay between the poetry and narrative. But why do you?

Joshua Berman (33:04)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a mysterious story, the whole thing.

Dru Johnson (33:29)
Why do we have a song telling us what we just saw?

Joshua Berman (33:33)
Right. And sometimes in some ways contradicting it and adding to it. Yeah. Yeah. So let me say that there’s no within biblical Hebrew, there is no word for prose and there is no word for poetry. Okay. These are ⁓ anachronistic ⁓ categories that we impose upon the biblical text. Okay. I will tell you that Egyptians did this all the time.

Dru Johnson (33:36)
Right, right.

Hmm.

Joshua Berman (34:00)
they have stories and suddenly someone bursts out in song in the middle of a story and does just this. mean, you know, in the, there’s a famous work, the Kadesh inscriptions of Ramses II, particularly one of them is called the Kadesh poem, where it’s a long description of his greatest achievement, the battle against the Hittites, the Hittite empire in 1274 BCE.

at the city of Kadesh on the Orantes River. And there’s a long narrative account, we would recognize, what we would categorize as a prose account. And then suddenly it breaks out into song and retells many of the same things, sometimes a little bit differently. And nobody said boo about this. And it’s for sure, it is absolutely for sure that those were commissioned by one and the same agent. That’s what’s also important.

Dru Johnson (34:41)
Mm.

Joshua Berman (34:57)
that the difference in genre does not necessarily imply a multiple authorship, just like in the Code of Hammurabi, there’s a prologue, there’s an epilogue, and then you have the laws in the middle. And the prologue and the epilogue each have their own genre. They’re different from one another and obviously different from the laws themselves. But it’s clear that Hammurabi is the one, I know if he wrote it, but he certainly commissioned it, and no one ever thought, wait, this doesn’t cohere.

⁓ Yeah, that’s our problem.

Dru Johnson (35:27)
Yeah, just to say,

maybe for our listeners to say what you’re not saying, which is, it is a standard practice in biblical scholarship ⁓ to look at these differences and then immediately begin looking at, well, maybe these are two different sources from two different, from centuries apart with different theological agendas.

Joshua Berman (35:42)
Sure. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. This is one of my big bones, as you know, Dru, that to be sensitive and I would say critical readers, we have to have the keys to the car. What does that mean? We have to know how ancients thought and wrote. You can’t just get into the car in 2025 and start to drive. You know what mean? You can’t just say, well, this is what seems to make sense to me.

Well, me, you know, I’m a prophet of a certain time and place. And we are, you know, the long heirs of a tradition of how to read from Aristotle. Even if you never read the poetics, that’s the air that you and I breathe. And everybody who grew up in the West, know, speaking English and being trained the way you and I were. ⁓ So it requires a little bit of removing the sands of time and recovering to the best that we can. And now we really can.

Dru Johnson (36:25)
Hmm.

you

Joshua Berman (36:42)
you know, wow, go look at, go read those Egyptian texts. And then suddenly things don’t look as strange in that context. One of the things that comes out is this mixing of narrative and of poetry, what we would call narrative and poetry. I don’t think the Egyptians had a word for it either. ⁓ Their capacity to withstand or tolerate what we would call contradiction. I don’t think they saw it that way at all. ⁓

Dru Johnson (37:08)
Right.

Joshua Berman (37:11)
They saw things as having multiple aspects to them, and there’s no problem with describing the same event two different ways. It’s all good.

Dru Johnson (37:19)
Hmm. And do you think that, you know, in some way does that implicate this understanding that, you know, five people witness something, they’re all going to have a slightly different version of it, and that’s just the way it goes? Or when you move this, what we would call narrative, into poetry, or we don’t know which way it started with, ⁓ that there’s always a loss or a perspectival shift that makes more sense in poetry than it makes in narrative?

Joshua Berman (37:46)
Hmm.

I don’t think it’s, it’s not the issue of the five different people standing in five different places. The text wants to tell you about different aspects of it, of a certain thing. ⁓ Yeah. You know, why, why, yeah.

Dru Johnson (37:53)
Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Now that makes sense. it’s difficult to describe to people outside of biblical studies how strong the tendency is to divide up text and put them in different centuries and in different places and combine them. So you’re given a chance to just say, well, maybe somebody wanted these to be read together and put them together as they were writing or put the song next to it from some source. ⁓

Joshua Berman (38:14)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Dru Johnson (38:27)
Finally, I would love it if you would share, the degree that you’re comfortable sharing, I would love for you to share about your work taking people down to Egypt. I think it would be surprising to a lot of people that you take large groups of Jewish people from Israel and other places down to Egypt. Yeah, you used to and hope to do it again, but what started that, how did you get into it, and how did that work with bunch of religious Jewish people in Egypt?

Joshua Berman (38:43)
Well, I used to. I used to. I hope to.

Yeah, right. well, one of my great inspirations is my dear friend and colleague and mentor, James Hofmeier, who’s an Egyptologist and also an Old Testament scholar. And from his work and from little dabblings that I had done in some Egyptological material, I always had a fascination with Egypt and, you know, that’s where it all begins. And I really wanted to see Egypt, but I didn’t want to just go and look at pyramids. I wanted to go with somebody who could, you know,

Dru Johnson (39:07)
Hmm.

Joshua Berman (39:27)
explained to me all these inscriptions and things that we see on the walls all over. ⁓ Professor Hoffmeier was leading a tour. He leads a tour every winter. And it’s for scholars and pastors. And I thought, ⁓ OK, I’ll join that. That’s good. I’ll have a whole ⁓ bodyguard crew of Christian scholars and pastors. That’s good. If I’m wearing a skull cap, then that’s a good thing. I’ll be in good shape.

Dru Johnson (39:29)
Hmm.

Right. Right.

Joshua Berman (39:56)
This was in January of 2021 at the height of COVID. There was nobody in Egypt other than us, practically. And when it was finished, I was so totally blown away by what I had learned and what I had seen. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, one day when the Messiah comes, I really have to bring Jews here to see all this stuff. And we’ll walk around Egypt with Bible in hand in the footsteps of the Exodus, literally.

Dru Johnson (40:03)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Berman (40:23)
and how every passage, one passage after another in the Bible just comes, just suddenly bursts out in color when you look at something on the wall and you understand what the connection is. And then after that, ⁓ I was sipping a latte with Hofmeyer on the banks of the Nile and about an hour later I thought, well, maybe we don’t need to wait for the Messiah. And then in 22 and 23, I took two groups each year and we went. And it was mind blowing.

Dru Johnson (40:46)
Hmm.

Joshua Berman (40:53)
I never had any problems with ⁓ anything anti-Semitic. ⁓ Eight months before the war broke out, I was ⁓ with a group in February of 23 in Egypt. And I was in a museum in Cairo. And I was approached by an Arab man, guess about 40 years old. And he says to me, are you from Israel? Because I walk around with my skull cap on. That’s just what I do. If I have to hide it, I don’t want to be there. ⁓

I said, well, yes, I am. And he said to me, I’m from Gaza. He said, my name is Hisham. This was on a Sunday. OK, this is important. You’ll see. He says, my name is Hisham. And I want to tell you that I hate Hamas. And I think that we should be making peace with you. And as far as yesterday was concerned, Shabbat shalom. That’s what he said to me. That’s what he said. So, you know.

Dru Johnson (41:27)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Wow.

Wow.

Joshua Berman (41:48)
Yes, your question was well founded. It’s not always so easy or maybe even so wise to be so visibly Jewish in some places. And then the most surprising things can happen as well. And I’m kind of hitting myself that I didn’t keep up the connection with him. I have no idea what’s with this man. Is he alive? Is he under rubble? I have no idea. I don’t know. But I think it is a testimony to…

Dru Johnson (42:07)
Mm-hmm. yeah. All right.

Joshua Berman (42:16)
⁓ the fact that maybe there is some hope, is some opportunity for optimism, that it’s not all one color. Maybe there some that are stronger, maybe there’s a louder voice. But this guy came over to me out of his own free will, tell me this, I suspect at least then he wasn’t the only one that felt that way. What’s gonna be now? May the Lord help us, I don’t know.

Dru Johnson (42:34)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well, on that note, thank you very much for sharing that. ⁓ It was very encouraging to me, and I can’t wait until those tours can start up again, because I will be on one for sure. All right. ⁓ Dr. Joshua Berman, thank you very much for your time, and as always, your wisdom.

Joshua Berman (42:43)
No,

Hey, that would be great to have you true. Wow. huh. Yeah.

Okay, wow. Thank you, Dru, and friends at home. Blessings and greetings from the Holy Land