Biblical Times Podcast

23: Samuel: The Pursuer and the Pursued

This episode presents the first meeting between two contrasting figures, whose relationship will develop into a powerful historical and psychological drama.
Samuel, the experienced religious leader, reveals himself in his old age as a zealous, angry, and vengeful character - contrary to the expectation that he would become a measured and balanced leader. Despite his impressive appearance and tall stature, Saul turns out to have a fragile and submissive personality.
The Bible describes the three coronations in which Samuel crowned Saul as the first king of Israel. While one would expect the young king's coronation to be a festive and respectful event, the opposite occurred. Each coronation was more humiliating and traumatic than the last.
In this episode, we lay the foundation for the troubled relationship between the two, which will continue to escalate and accompany Saul's miserable years of reign until his tragic end.
The sharp contrast between Samuel and Saul creates a powerful drama that unfolds against the backdrop of the struggle against the Philistines.

22: Samuel and the Tribal Elders

The episode deals with the transition period of Israelite society from a tribal structure to a monarchy, because of the Philistine threat to Israelite settlements.
The Philistines, who arrived in the land of Israel around 1200 BCE, initially settled in coastal cities and later penetrated inland, aiming to forcibly take over the houses and lands of the Israelites.
The Philistines excelled in military organization, advanced warfare methods, and the knowledge required to produce iron weapons.
Moreover, their society was led by skilled military commanders who cooperated in war times.
By contrast, the Israelite tribal society was led by elders with civilian roles, who did not cooperate even in times of war - weakening them all and playing into the hands of the Philistines.
The tribal elders understood the need for unity and the appointment of a king who would establish a unified army to protect all the tribes of Israel.
Chapter 8 describes their meeting with Samuel and their demand to appoint a king.
Chapter 8 reveals another critical fact: Samuel had two corrupt sons who took bribes, and despite knowing this, he prepared them to inherit his position, which the elders strongly opposed.
Samuel opposed the elders' request to appoint a king, claiming it was a rebellion against God, but God instructed him to comply with their request.
In our view, as revenge for the harsh criticism directed at his sons, Samuel chose a young man lacking self-confidence and military experience - Saul - as king.
In the following episodes, we will prove this claim and also demonstrate that Samuel brought about Saul's downfall.

21: Samuel: The Destruction of the Temple at Shiloh

This episode focuses on Chapter 4 of the Book of Samuel, introducing the Philistines and their conflict with Israel.
The Philistines were ancient tribes who arrived on Israel's coast around the 12th century BCE.
 Initially, they settled in coastal cities of Israel, but gradually they moved inland. This shift led to wars with the Israelites over farmland and water sources.
Chapter 4 describes a severe battle where the Philistines defeated Israel, destroyed the temple at Shiloh, and captured the Ark of the Covenant.
The Philistines took the Ark to Dagon's (their supreme god) temple in Ashdod. Still, according to the biblical narrative, the God of Israel prevailed over Dagon and afflicted the Philistines with plagues.
After seven months, they returned the Ark to Israel, though they continued to attack Israelite settlements.
This episode notes that while the Philistines left numerous archaeological artifacts indicating a sophisticated culture, they eventually disappeared from history.
However, during the period described in the Book of Samuel, they were at the height of their power and significantly influenced the ancient Near East.

20: The Lord Calls Samuel

This episode focuses on Chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Samuel, set around 1070 BCE in Shiloh, a small worship center near Jerusalem. The story details Samuel's early life under the guidance of Eli, the elderly priest.
Chapter 2 emphasizes the corrupt behavior of Eli's two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, described as "scoundrels." These brothers abuse their priestly positions by stealing meat from sacrifices and committing sexual crimes in the temple area. In stark contrast, young Samuel is portrayed as obedient and respectful, growing in favor of God and people. Samuel's behavior justifies his inheritance of Eli's position instead of Eli's sons.
The narrative reaches a climax when God reveals himself to Samuel three times in one night, declaring His intention to bring calamity upon Eli's family for the sons' blasphemy and Eli's failure to restrain them.
In this episode, we provide examples of a literary motif common in the ancient world. According to this motif, sons born miraculously through divine intervention to elderly and barren women were destined to fulfill religious and national missions. Although the Virgin Mary, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, was a young woman, Jesus too was destined to fulfill a religious mission even before his birth.
This episode also highlights the contrast between Eli's loving treatment of young Samuel and the old Samuel, who became an angry man. To a large extent, Samuel's harsh behavior led to the downfall of the young King Saul.

19: The Year Before Samuel's Birth

Our story takes place in Shiloh in the year preceding Samuel's birth.
Shiloh was a small settlement with a small worship center, to which Elkanah, Samuel's father, and his two wives, Peninnah and Hannah, used to come every year to perform some religious ceremony.
The Bible describes the hostile relationship that existed between Peninnah and Hannah. Yet, at the center of the story is the statement that God had closed Hannah's womb, and therefore she suffered from prolonged years of barrenness.
In this episode, we focus on two important matters. One is an ancient belief that God controls fertility in the world, including the fertility of women – and Hannah believed this as well.
Like Hannah, Sarah and Rachel also believed that for an unknown reason, God did not allow them to become pregnant for many years, which caused them great sorrow.
But unlike Sarah and Rachel, Hannah made a vow to persuade God to open her womb and allow her to become pregnant – and this is the second matter we focus on.
A vow is a paid oath. It is the most expensive payment that the person making the vow commits to before God, and this is exactly what Hannah intended!
Hannah swore that if she had a child, the child she had been waiting and longing for many years, would grow up and live all his life in the small temple that stood in Shiloh, and not with her or in his parents' home. As we know, Hannah kept her commitment.
In this episode, we define what a vow is, and how a vow made by a woman differs from that of a man.
Additionally, we discuss the meaning of the name Samuel. In English, the name Samuel has no meaning, but in the original language, the name Samuel (Shmuel in Hebrew) has several interpretations that play an important role in the story.

18: Ancient Creation Mythologies

The Bible opens with two creation stories describing how God created the world, to which we dedicated the previous two episodes (16 and 17).
The first tells how God created the world over six days, and how He sanctified the seventh day as a day of rest. The second story focuses on the act that led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
This episode is a bonus episode to the two creation stories in the Bible, with two main purposes.
The first is to show that these stories were not written in a vacuum and that they contain literary motifs that appear dozens of times in the mythologies told by ancient peoples.
For example, many people told that before creation, the universe was flooded with water, and that creation began from the waters, as told in the book of Genesis.
According to the story in Chapter 2 of Genesis, God created the first man and all the animals from dust. The motif that the gods created the first humans from earth, mud, or clay is also repeated in many ancient mythologies.
The serpent is one of the great heroes that recur in countless myths.  In all of them, as in the Bible, it is considered the most cunning of all animals and the eternal enemy of man. The serpent symbolizes the power to kill and the power to revive. And because it sheds its skin, the ancients believed it lived forever.
The second goal we had in our bonus episode was to show that the ancients were intensively engaged in the same questions that occupy researchers today.
Like the best researchers at the world's top universities, they too sought to know how the world was created, and why humans are endowed with abilities that no other animal possesses. And of course, they too feared death and sought to live eternal lives.
But while scientists living today are committed to explaining their research according to a rigid academic methodology, and with the aid of sophisticated technological means, in practice they are revisiting the same questions that were asked about 5,000 years ago.

17: Creation

The Book of Genesis tells of two different creation stories. One focuses on the world's creation in six days and the sanctification of the seventh day, on which God rested from His work of creation.
In the previous episode, we discussed how this story forms the basis for many social laws, teaching that social order is an organic part of the order of the world's creation.
The second creation story focuses on violating God's prohibition against eating from the fruit of the 'Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil', which we refer to here as a "Perfect Crime."
The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God planted in the Garden of Eden, had two miraculous qualities, not found in any other tree. The first is embodied in the tree's name: The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
According to the Bible, knowledge has only one meaning and purpose: the ability to recognize God's existence, to hear and understand His words and laws.
Had man not eaten from the fruit that gave him this ability, nothing would have distinguished human beings from all the other animals God created.
If so, what logic explains the severe prohibition against eating this excellent fruit?
The answer is that the second quality of the fruit was death. And so, God said to the first man:
"for when you eat from it you will certainly die."
The ancients believed, and so in the Bible, in different degrees of impurity, the most severe among them being the body of a dead person.
The ancients believed that the impurity created in the body of a dead person was drawn like a magnet to the temples they built to honor the gods they believed in.
The impurity that originates in the dead human body contaminates the temple and causes the gods to be expelled from it.
This belief also exists in the Bible!
There is no dispute that the garden planted by God was the holiest and purest place on earth, and therefore the most vulnerable to impurity.
To maintain the absolute purity of this wondrous garden, no one was born or died in it. As a result, life in the garden took place in a sterile frozen capsule, that was hermetically sealed.
To set the wheels of the real world in motion, the first couple had to eat the forbidden fruit!
And the moment they did so, two things happened simultaneously.
The first was that their DNA, and that of all their descendants, was forever changed.
Thanks to eating from the forbidden fruit, of all the creatures God created, only humans are capable of recognizing His existence, and only to them did He give laws and commandments.
However, impurity, especially the impurity created in a dead body, became an inherent part of humanity. From this fact, it is clear that to maintain the purity of the Garden of Eden, God had to expel the first couple from the holy garden, along with all the animals.
The second result of the "perfect crime" was that the real world, which is far from being idyllic and pure, where people are born and die, began its long journey.
Finally, we have one more comment:
According to the Bible, the Garden of Eden was on earth, but in Jewish and Christian tradition, the garden resides in heaven.
We will discuss in the future how the garden ascended to blue sky and became the dwelling place for the souls of the righteous dead.

16: Genesis: The Laws Derived from the Creation Story

The Book of Genesis opens with two stories that tell how God created the world.
The first recounts that God created the world in six days and sanctified the seventh day since He rested from the work of creation.
The second story focuses on the deed that led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, which we will discuss in the next episode.
The episode before us is dedicated to the first creation story, where the fact that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, forms a legal foundation for many revolutionary laws, unknown to the ancient world, which are an integral part of the creation of the world.
Based on the creation story, the legislator, who according to the Bible is always God, divided the infinite sequence of days into three portions.
The first portion is of seven days, consisting of six workdays followed by a day of rest, to which all humans and working animals are entitled. In every respect, this is the most advanced social law in human history!
The second portion is seven years, and it refers to what the Bible calls a "Hebrew slave," who fell into a severe economic crisis that forced him to take a loan that he could not repay.
To pay his debt, he had to mortgage his land, and if that was not enough, then he and his wife were forced to pay their debt by working for the lender. In practice, they became slaves for six years – and in the seventh year, they were set free.
The third division expands the second division, and it is 49 years, which is a multiple of 7 times 7 years.
We said that a person who took a loan he could not repay was forced to mortgage his land and his labor to the lender. We also said that he and his wife were set free in the seventh year, but in this case, his land remained mortgaged and continued to pay the old debt.
A person who was set free, but whose land remained mortgaged, could never recover economically – and the third division addresses this situation.
If the land was not released earlier, then it was released after 49 years and returned to its original owner, who was likely no longer alive. But his children and grandchildren were alive, and returning land allowed them to rehabilitate their economic lives.
The story that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh is not as banal as many think. A broad reading reveals that all the social laws scattered throughout the Bible are an organic part of the creation and that they were intended to create a society where everyone is equal before the law. A just society that has compassion for the weak.

15: The Book of Ruth: Part III

The Book of Ruth is considered the most beautiful story in the Bible and one of the most beautiful short stories ever written.
Ruth's story takes place around 1100 BCE when Israeli society was still tribal. A tribe was a cluster of extended families living in the tribe's territory, maintaining mutual responsibility and protecting their people.
During one of the drought years that afflicted Israel, Elimelech, Naomi's husband from the tribe of Judah, fell into heavy debt. To pay his debt, Elimelech had to mortgage his land, and he, Naomi, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, left their home in Bethlehem to live in an ancient land that no longer exists, called Moab.
In Moab, Mahlon and Chilion married two local girls: Ruth and Orpah. However, shortly after, a great tragedy befell the small family: Elimelech and his two sons passed away, leaving behind three poor and heartbroken widows.
After the tragedy, Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem, but first, she released her ownership of Ruth and Orpah. Orpah indeed returned to her father's house in Moab, but Ruth tied her fate to Naomi's and arrived with her in Bethlehem.
To support herself and Naomi, Ruth went to glean ears of grain in one of the wheat fields near Bethlehem, where she met Boaz, the wealthy farmer who owned the field. Boaz and Ruth fell in love, married, and had a son named Obed, who became the grandfather of King David.
On the surface, this story seems simple, even bland, but the opposite is true.  It is a complex legal document written in the form of a story.
In the three episodes, we dedicate to Ruth's book, we reveal the social and legal system hidden within the story.
Elimelech, who mortgaged his land to a foreign creditor, pledged a portion of the tribe of Judah's territory. To prevent the tribe's territory from shrinking, one of his relatives was obligated to "redeem his land." That is, to pay the debt and return the land to the possession of the tribe of Judah (which Boaz does in our story).
We mentioned that before Naomi's return to Bethlehem, she released her ownership of Ruth and Orpah. Naomi did this because, in the Book of Deuteronomy (25), there is a law stating that the widow remained in the possession of her deceased husband's family and that she was not allowed to act as she pleased or remarry on her own accord.
From the day Naomi released Ruth and Orpah, the familial and legal relationships between her and Ruth ended. Although Ruth stayed with Naomi, this did not change the fact that between the two women who loved each other like mother and daughter, no formal relationships existed anymore, and Ruth did not belong to any tribe or family in Bethlehem. She didn't have any social or legal protection in Israel. Ruth's vulnerable situation explains why Boaz extended his protection to her, and why to secure her future Naomi wanted her to marry Boaz.
Boaz, who paid Elimelech's debt, did not marry Ruth in a regular marriage, but according to the levirate marriage law. By doing so, the land whose debt he paid made a U-turn and returned to the possession of Elimelech's house. Obed, the son Ruth bore, was formally considered the son of Mahlon, Ruth's first husband, and Naomi's grandson, continuing her family line that had effectively become extinct.
As we said, on the surface, Ruth's book seems naive. In reality, this story is a fascinating, genius creation because the many laws contained within it form an integral part of the story. Those who read the story without understanding tribal society and its laws read a beautiful but flat story lacking any depth.

14: The Book of Ruth: Part II

The Book of Ruth is considered the most beautiful story in the Bible and one of the most beautiful short stories ever written.
Ruth's story takes place around 1100 BCE when Israeli society was still tribal. A tribe was a cluster of extended families living in the tribe's territory, maintaining mutual responsibility and protecting their people.
During one of the drought years that afflicted Israel, Elimelech, Naomi's husband from the tribe of Judah, fell into heavy debt. To pay his debt, Elimelech had to mortgage his land, and he, Naomi, and their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, left their home in Bethlehem to live in an ancient land that no longer exists, called Moab.
In Moab, Mahlon and Chilion married two local girls: Ruth and Orpah. However, shortly after, a great tragedy befell the small family: Elimelech and his two sons passed away, leaving behind three poor and heartbroken widows.
After the tragedy, Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem, but first, she released her ownership of Ruth and Orpah. Orpah indeed returned to her father's house in Moab, but Ruth tied her fate to Naomi's and arrived with her in Bethlehem.
To support herself and Naomi, Ruth went to glean ears of grain in one of the wheat fields near Bethlehem, where she met Boaz, the wealthy farmer who owned the field. Boaz and Ruth fell in love, married, and had a son named Obed, who became the grandfather of King David.
On the surface, this story seems simple, even bland, but the opposite is true.  It is a complex legal document written in the form of a story.
In the three episodes, we dedicate to Ruth's book, we reveal the social and legal system hidden within the story.
Elimelech, who mortgaged his land to a foreign creditor, pledged a portion of the tribe of Judah's territory. To prevent the tribe's territory from shrinking, one of his relatives was obligated to "redeem his land." That is, to pay the debt and return the land to the possession of the tribe of Judah (which Boaz does in our story).
We mentioned that before Naomi's return to Bethlehem, she released her ownership of Ruth and Orpah. Naomi did this because, in the Book of Deuteronomy (25), there is a law stating that the widow remained in the possession of her deceased husband's family and that she was not allowed to act as she pleased or remarry on her own accord.
From the day Naomi released Ruth and Orpah, the familial and legal relationships between her and Ruth ended. Although Ruth stayed with Naomi, this did not change the fact that between the two women who loved each other like mother and daughter, no formal relationships existed anymore, and Ruth did not belong to any tribe or family in Bethlehem. She didn't have any social or legal protection in Israel. Ruth's vulnerable situation explains why Boaz extended his protection to her, and why to secure her future Naomi wanted her to marry Boaz.
Boaz, who paid Elimelech's debt, did not marry Ruth in a regular marriage, but according to the levirate marriage law. By doing so, the land whose debt he paid made a U-turn and returned to the possession of Elimelech's house. Obed, the son Ruth bore, was formally considered the son of Mahlon, Ruth's first husband, and Naomi's grandson, continuing her family line that had effectively become extinct.
As we said, on the surface, Ruth's book seems naive. In reality, this story is a fascinating, genius creation because the many laws contained within it form an integral part of the story. Those who read the story without understanding tribal society and its laws read a beautiful but flat story lacking any depth.