Numbers: Not As Boring As It Sounds! | Secular Bible Study (Episode 4)

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Welcome to Mindshift, I'm Brandon, and today is episode four of our newest series, A Secular Bible Study, in which we focus on one book of the Bible every Thursday morning at 9 a.m.
Central Time.
Today is episode four, and that is Numbers.
But don't click off just because you think that's going to be the boringest book ever.
What a terrible name.
They could have named this book anything.
This book is about smiting.
This book is about God's wrath.
This book is about poisonous snakes and leprosy and the earth swallowing people, spies and miracles and events happen in this book.
This does not want to be skipped, and it plays a pivotal role in what has been developing in the first three books and what is to come for God's chosen people.
So stick with me.
We're going to go lightning fast through these seven points here and give you guys an excellent understanding of the book of Numbers.
Let's start right now with point one, which is book overview.
Where do I even begin?
Again, so much happens here, and I want to give you guys some structure.
So the reason the book is called Numbers is because it starts and ends with a census.
And again, this is just a couple of years after they have left Egypt, and now we see the full 12 tribes with a special proclamation for the tribe of Levi or the Levites being the priestly tribe.
But we get a full accounting of these 12 tribes, how many people we have, how many soldiers we have, etc.
Thus, the book of Numbers.
And by the end, we're looking at the next generation, the generation that gets to enter the promised land.
So I'll clear up this confusion right here, because so many people make the jokes, and I have too, because it's funny, like, oh, God's a horrible GPS system.
Why did it take 40 years to go what should have been an 11-day walk?
It's because of this curse, actually.
Yes, it's a time of testing and trial, but they aren't just wandering the whole time.
In fact, they spent the last year camped at Sinai, essentially.
Now they're packing up to leave Sinai.
They're going to head to the promised land.
It's not too far.
We had to take that year to establish the law and figure out the tabernacle and get everything like that set, but we're ready to go.
And then on the way, they screw up, and God punishes them and says, nope, you guys don't get to go in, but your children will.
The next generation will.
Thus, the other 30-some years of wandering around in the wilderness, and then we take a census at the end of the book, and those are the people that are going to inherit Canaan, the promised land.
I just think it's funny.
They're like weeks away from entering the promised land, and they want to go back, but now that they're never going to get to go to the promised land, now they want to stay.
Okay, so let's do a speed run through all of the events that happen here in the book of Numbers. 12 tribes.
Levites are the priestly tribe.
How to camp around the tabernacle.
People complain.
Miracles like manna happen.
So in some sense, God is providing, even though many people are dying.
More people complain.
This time, it's Aaron and Miriam about Moses's leadership, which you can't really blame Aaron.
He just lost his two sons.
He's got to be like, what the heck am I doing here?
Not to mention Miriam, bless Miriam's heart.
She is leading these people in praise and worship.
She has a moment of doubt with Moses, which I think makes total sense, but don't worry, God gives her leprosy and she dies during this book.
It's not going well for the family of Moses.
Also in this book, Moses disobeys.
This happens with the miracle at the rock, where instead of letting God do his thing by Moses talking to the rock, he strikes the rock.
Now Moses gets a punishment of not getting to go in the promised land.
There's a rebellion.
It's called Korah's rebellion, but don't worry, God opens up the earth and eats up a bunch of these people.
Then there's still like 250 people that are supporting it.
He sends fire to consume them.
Then we get the 12 spies.
They're hanging out.
They're looking over at Canaan.
They're like, hey, we can't do it.
These people are big, which is hilarious to me.
Like they've been following, I'm going to stop counting by the way, they've been following God literally, physically, they've seen him get them out of Egypt, the biggest military force on the planet at the time.
He is supposedly taken them through the Red Sea, which he parted.
He sends them literal sky food for them to eat.
He brings water out of rocks, but seeing some people in the land they knew they were going to have to fight to take over is too much for them.
And these 12 spies, one from each of the tribes, 10 of them say, nope, can't do it.
Then we get the heroes, Joshua and Caleb.
I remember wanting to be like Joshua so much as a kid, which is disgusting now when you learn what Joshua becomes, but 10 of them are like, guys, not a good idea.
Like what was the point of having spies if we're not going to take their word?
This is another just ridiculous thing.
Either God was going to miraculously hand over the Canaanites to the Israelites, or it really is a strategic mission and has to do with no divine intervention whatsoever.
In which case we should probably listen to the spies, but the spies get everyone all worked up.
They're like, guys, we can't do it.
Everyone freaks out and is like, we can't do it.
Probably because they never saw any of those other miracles because they never happened, but I digress.
They want to go home.
God says, no, you're cursed.
This is when their curse happens.
By the way, intermixed in all of this is a lot of punishments.
We get punishments with the serpents that come and literally bite like everyone.
And Moses is like, God, don't forget about your promise.
You promised Abraham you were going to take care of these people and use them to bless all the world.
And God's like, darn it.
You're right.
Thanks for bringing up the contract.
Okay.
Make a bronze statue of a serpent, hang it high and have the people look at it and they'll be healed.
So it seems like God was this close to breaking his covenant with Abraham and destroying the free will of anyone involved here with all of these interventions.
But he listens to humble little Moses who gets them out of this jam just for them to get in another jam coming up.
And then Moses makes the same mistake.
It's right after this that he does the rock thing.
Now he gets the same punishment and he's like, darn it.
I guess I forgot everything I just got done praying for, for all the people.
And I did it myself.
By the way, at some point here, we get the talking donkey.
Just wanted to throw that out there.
We get a real story about the talking donkey.
In fact, it's Balaam's donkey.
Balaam is a prophet who works for King Moab.
And King Moab is like, yo, I don't like all these people hanging out in my Moab territories.
And he sends his prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites.
But every time Balaam opens his mouth to curse the Israelites, only blessings come out.
And he's mad and his donkey's giving him some good advice.
The donkey is wise, just like the serpent was wise, by the way.
Seems like all the animals are smarter than all the Israelites and all the people around at this time.
And he's so mad at this miraculous wise donkey that he beats his donkey.
Whatever.
Total side note.
Just hilarious that that is interjected as fact in this book.
We see a lot of other things in this book, like how God doesn't like interracial marriages because when one man comes back, he didn't buy her, he didn't steal her.
He married a Midianite, I believe.
One of the soldiers saw it and was like, no way, not on my watch, and spears them both through the belly in their tent.
What a way to go.
And then God says, hey man, you did a great job.
I'm going to bless you.
Thank you for putting that to rest before I had to kill everyone.
That's what he says.
Let me read it to you.
The Lord spoke to Moses saying, Phinehas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron, the priest, has turned back my wrath from the Israelites by manifesting such zeal among them on my Therefore say I hereby grant him by my covenant of peace.
It shall be for him and for his descendants after him a covenant of perpetual priesthood because he was zealous for God and made atonement for the Israelites.
Right after he killed those two people, the verse says, so the plague was stopped among the people of Israel.
This is like when interracial marriage was happening for the first time here in the States.
Imagine if someone had killed the first black and white person to be together and God said, Oh yeah, you did it buddy.
Thank you.
I was about to kill the whole United States, but now I don't have to because you were jealous for me and you stopped the plague of this inbreeding.
This is the God you worship.
All right.
That's the overview of the book of numbers.
That's just point one.
It'll allow us to go quicker on the rest of this.
And like I said, just a ton of stuff happens here.
I didn't even cover it.
The book of numbers should be referring to the number of people God killed in this book, not the two censuses that were taken.
And that's how the book ends.
Again, the census of the newest generation before they get ready to enter the promised land.
And we'll pick up with that in Deuteronomy.
Point two here, we're going to breeze through, which is authorship and date.
Once again, as I've covered in the first three books, it's either Moses or many other theories, but probably this documentary hypothesis, which lists four sources that were compiled together during the sixth century BCE, during the time of the captivity in Babylon.
Specifically numbers is where we start really utilizing our D source in addition to the other three.
And then we use that D source primarily for book five here in the Pentateuch.
In terms of timeframe, we've talked about it.
Numbers starts two years, two months, and one day after they leave Egypt, the census is done.
We get an entire generation, about 38 years to round it out to the 40 years that they're supposed to be wandering.
And that's right where the book ends.
So we have a nice number for this one, about 38 years happened.
And I'd like to point out, imagine if these stories were true.
We are seeing snippets of what happens over just a very small timeframe in the text that is given.
Imagine living with this kind of a God in the desert for 38 years, battle after battle.
Because during this, they're running into all kinds of other tribes, dealing with interracial marriages again, and kings and prophets of other nations, like a lot's happening just in what we're told about.
But imagine 38 years of this.
Imagine all the smiting.
Imagine all the laws that were broken, all the people that were put to death.
Imagine all the miracles that had to happen to keep these people in these 12 tribes going.
Imagine the dissension that happened when these people found out they weren't going to enter the promised land.
And they're wrestling between having to want this for their children and believe that God will deliver it, when He just turned His back on them.
They were promised this same thing in leaving Egypt.
They trusted in God, and yes, because of their own actions, He's taken this away from them.
But it's called the promised land, not the maybe land, right?
Like it's not promised, apparently, to any individual.
It's promised maybe to this people group at large.
So what's to say their children will even get in?
Maybe God's going to do this another 15 times.
And meanwhile, He's letting snakes into your camp and rewarding the priest for catching you doing any and every little thing against His precious law?
I think that even though they are the aggressor in this story, we see them raping and pillaging and taking slaves.
I think they are the ones still enslaved.
Worse than anything Pharaoh did in Egypt.
The scrutiny with which this omnipotent, omnipresent being is hearing their every thought and seeing their every deed and choosing to punish them for each and every one of those along the way while keeping them on the verge of what appears to be starvation and dehydration as a constant state.
I just can't imagine if this were actually true, how horrific this would be.
Point three is about the historical background or accuracy, etc.
We've covered this a little bit.
You know, we've got these 38 years.
It's just this people group.
They are bumping into other nations now, which wasn't happening so much in Leviticus.
We have no records from these other nations.
Some of them not even existing and some of them that existing having no confrontation with Israelites, etc.
Again, you could talk about how history is written by the victors and the Israelites are winning all of these battles.
And so we're really only having their version of that here that they're compiling, by the way, later on when they're in captivity, right?
Like I'm sure it's tempting when you're putting together all of your folklore and mythological oral traditions to say, remember when we were a great tribe?
Remember when God delivered us and did this and did this and did this as you're hoping to be delivered again from your captivity in Babylon?
Like this isn't going to be a very strict source of truth material.
But what can we get from a historical background here?
Well, we can see a nomadic lifestyle.
This is very common for many different tribes at this time.
We also see how tribal leadership works and the hierarchies that go within that.
These tribal dynamics referenced in numbers are very accurate for their time, which again, this is the 13th century BCE is when this is believed to have happened, if it were to be accurate.
This entire concept of a wilderness journey, by the way, is a theme or a motif.
Anytime you have a heroic person or heroic people group, there is this trial through tough landscape.
We see this almost a direct copy from the Epic of Gilgamesh, where we have the wilderness journey.
So again, from a mythological point of view, this is looking really similar for ancient Near Eastern text of this time.
Like anything, there's going to be seeds of truth in these stories.
From an archaeological perspective, just in this area, roughly around this time, we do see highways or trade routes, if you will, the Viamaris and the Kings Highway.
Both of these are well-known and established routes that would have gone through diverse tribes around this area at that time.
Were the Israelites really there or not?
We don't know.
Were a smaller group of them passing through at that time and captured that part for their oral tradition in history?
Very possibly so.
Once again, pointing back to Exodus here, and I know we're not at errors and contradictions and misconceptions yet, but a people group this big would have filled this space and there would be nothing but artifacts for us to find.
And we're not finding any particular ones of this particular group at this particular time in this particular place.
Let's move on to point four, which is going to be literary analysis.
Now, what's cool is we've seen quite a few different literary techniques and genres used throughout these first few books of the Bible, and each book utilizes something different.
We got a very different storytelling technique in Genesis than we did of, say, the record-keeping and law in Leviticus.
We see a lot of poetry in Exodus, where in Numbers we're seeing something more substantial.
The very fact that this book starts off with census data really takes a step up even from Leviticus in trying to nail down some specifics.
So overall, the genre here is this historical narrative of the ancient Near East, but included in that is this legal literature.
We get a lot of lists here.
We get a lot of instruction here.
And then to tie this all together, we get a technique known as cyclical narrative, which works well with another technique of repetition to show us this nature of God and his people, of messing up and punishment, but of grace and reward, which leads to messing up and punishment.
Again, just the circle that goes round and round.
And we get different interjections of that.
Who is messing up?
Who are they sinning against?
Is it God?
Is it the leadership?
Is it the law itself?
Who is interceding on their behalf?
Is it Moses for the people?
Is it the people for their children?
Is it some of the spies for the other spies?
What is God's punishment here?
Still some form of justice has to happen.
And then what do we learn or what mercy do we receive back at the top?
And then the cycle starts over and it's bookended by these two censuses, which is also just a neat structure.
So in terms of putting this together, it wasn't just happenstance.
No, we wanted to convey a message.
In fact, a lot of this book is using another technique, which is foreshadowing, or at least it becomes foreshadowing when the writers of the New Testament go back and create events to match up with that.
But in general, you're setting the stage for a lot of symbolic things like raising the serpent up for the people to look at and be healed.
This is an allusion to what Christ will do when he, as greater than them, crushes the serpent to pay for the iniquities and to heal us from our sins.
More spiritual and metaphorical.
So again, a lot of techniques at play here and a really interesting look at ancient literature.
And through that literature, we want to convey some themes.
So let's move on to point five where we talk about those main themes and what we should be getting from them.
This is just a part for me to be creative because there's so many themes in all of these books and you can take them and extrapolate them to get whatever message you want.
That's what good mythological storytelling allows for.
If it was just strict, if it was just some census data here and they moved from point A to point B, we couldn't pull as much out from this.
But we get so much in this book that we could talk about many aspects.
So the first one I'll bring up is probably that of leadership.
Now we've seen leadership at play quite a bit through Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus, but now we're really seeing leadership from multiple people.
We have God's leadership.
We have Moses' leadership.
We have the priestly leadership and Aaron's leadership.
We have Miriam's leadership.
She's in charge of praise and worship, by the way.
We have Joshua's leadership over the spies and the soldiers.
And in each of these iterations, we see good leadership and we see leadership that is questioned or even mutinied against, like with Korah against Moses.
And we see the response to that, the justice of that.
And whether it's reflecting good leadership or bad leadership or what is the right way or wrong way to lead a diverse and large group of people to fulfill God's destiny for the world, like talk about a calling here.
This is like the last spaceship off earth trying to save humankind and keep the species going except through and for a divine right.
It's an amazing undertaking.
And those that get put in these positions of leadership and how they react and handle that and the faith that they have or don't have and the justice that they do or don't enact is a huge part of this story.
I've said before that divine guidance is a huge theme in the Pentateuch in general, and we see that continued throughout Numbers.
We still have the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud.
We still have him showing up, doing miracles, feeding them, giving them water to drink, both in miraculous ways, helping them defeat their enemies and keeping them in check.
I mean, he doesn't just allow these people to die.
If he is going to affect judgment, it is with, again, poisonous snakes.
You have leprosy, one of the worst plagues in the ancient world, the earth swallowing people up, the ones that the earth missed, fire consuming.
So again, just at every chance, divine intervention, which all seems very problematic to me with the concept of free will, but God is just really involved, which if you want to say one thing about the Old Testament, specifically the Pentateuch, we had a God that does not have to worry about the divine hiddenness argument.
He is showing up to his people and his enemies.
Another theme might be justice and or consequence.
This is the book of all books when it comes to that.
Yes, we see initially in the first three books, the covenant and the law and the ritual and the purity, but now we're really getting a firsthand look at what happens when we disobey at the consequences, at God's wrath, about God's jealousy.
This is where a lot of the jealous parts of God come out.
The bargaining that is done with God for these people, remember your promises.
People changing God's mind, not just Moses, but the soldier who kills the interracial couple essentially saved, I mean, he's the hero of the entire Bible.
He saved all of Israel.
He kept God's plan together when God was just about to lose it.
So again, issues with free will here, but either way, a huge theme of consequence and justice.
The last thing that I would mention, and you could get so many, would be that of faith, right?
And I especially think of it in regards to the generation that is cursed and will not go to the promised land, but the faith that they must try to hold onto for their children's sake.
Still teaching their children about this God, teaching them the rules to follow, how to sacrifice, how to make atonement, how to give thanks.
There's little children in this time period that are going to be raised up to be the soldiers that defeat the Canaanites.
The kids that are out playing right now are going to be the ones that go into the land of milk and honey.
They will fulfill God's destiny and blessing.
If you can have enough faith to persevere when you're starving and when your spouse dies and when your children are smote, God is testing to the nth degree during these 38 years.
So faith is what he's looking for, and faith is the requirement that will eventually lead to the deliverance on that promise from God.
So what has the world learned from Numbers since this book was put together?
What is the reception and influence, and this will move us into point six.
I always try to talk about the three different receptions, the religious reception, the Christian reception, and the scholarly reception.
In terms of how the Jews use it, it's to look at God's favor.
It's to look at God's eventual blessing.
It's to see that he keeps his words and to understand the trials that come.
It's to focus and reflect on a yearly basis on things like belief and faith and obedience and deliverance.
From the Christian perspective, it's utilized to look at God's fruition, to see the things that point to Jesus, that where even the highest prophets like Moses failed through things like pride and anger, which is what we see Moses display at the rock, and how even Aaron wasn't good enough as a high priest, and the spies and the soldiers for God are doubting their abilities, that Jesus is the only one that could come and make all of these things right, that Jesus delivers the promises of God, that Jesus could remain blameless and without pride and ego like Moses, that Jesus is the one who's going to heal his people in the same way that God raised up the serpent to heal his people who were all dying and struggling of their iniquities.
It is a book of foreshadowing.
And since Christians have the blessing of hindsight and have the New Testament to compare it to, it really looks like a journey into God's providence, a making right, a deliverance of promises, etc.
And again, the scholarly reception, we start getting into like the D source here and really understanding from the priestly aspect and the rituals of tribalistic nature and thematic structure that we see so well exemplified in Numbers, it has been an excellent source for again that ancient Near Eastern texts.
In terms of impact on culture and literature and things of that nature, very similar to how we saw Exodus being this narrative that is taken in Western culture about deliverance and freedom.
We see Numbers being used with the journey, the hero's journey, the trial and the testing.
We see comparison even in the New Testament to Christ 40 days in the wilderness and his fasting there with very little water and no food being a similar theme to what is happening to his people group for 40 years back here in Numbers during their wandering.
This works its way into so much literature, probably the highlight is the Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.
But again, this theme is everywhere and it didn't start here in Numbers, but being that Numbers made it into the Bible and the Bible being such a central source to get these kinds of allegories and stories, we see an extreme trickle-down effect from that point.
From an artistic point of view, this is where a lot of imagery comes from.
It's funny, you may have never read the book of Numbers, but how many times have you seen these images of manna falling down, of water coming from the rock, of the earth swallowing up to eat people, of God smiting people with fire from heaven.
This is a book of imagery and because of that, from an artistic interpretation side, it has been widely cast to reflect this incredible eventful book of Numbers.
But let's wrap up today, let's move on to point seven here, which is going to be contradictions, errors, and misconceptions.
Or as much of those as we want to get to and each book is going to be a little different with which of those we focus on.
The problem that the Bible is getting into as it's trying to get more specific, and we saw this in Genesis with its genealogies, is now we have census data and that census data isn't making sense.
It doesn't make sense congruently within the own book.
We get several different accountings of how many, for instance, fighting warriors the Israelite people had, not just within the book of Numbers, but as we see later on how that number could not have changed so vastly as we get new numbers in say, Judges or Joshua.
So like the book suggests, Numbers, we get a lot of different numbers and they don't all co-align and some of them are mutually exclusive.
We get something called the quail incident, which I don't know how much you want to look into, but in Numbers, the Israelites continue to complain about their lack of food, specifically a lack of meat, and God is sending a mass amount of quails.
But in earlier parts of Exodus, specifically Exodus 16, we see that manna is going to be the source of food for these people, period.
Not a hill I'm willing to die on, but something that is in the book of Numbers, and so I did want to mention it.
And I guess I'm using this time to talk more about the morality issues with God's character as seen in the book of Numbers.
There are some really problematic things other than the interracial relationship that I already mentioned that was a plague to God.
Numbers 31 is highly problematic to God's character.
I'll set the stage and then I'll read you the specific problematic verses.
I mean, the whole thing is problematic.
They want to go and attack the Midianites.
I think maybe it's more problematic in general than people talk about.
We always just take for granted, like, God had to send them to Canaan.
Why not make your promised land right there in the desert that you've been wandering around that's not claimed by anyone?
Oh, it's not very fruitful.
It's not filled with milk and honey.
You're God.
You're doing miracles on a daily basis.
Bless this land and make your people group.
The fact that they had to go and conquer is already an issue that is very seldomly addressed.
But the Midianites need to be wiped out, and so they get a thousand men from each tribe.
So 12,000 men go and attack.
They kill every single man.
And then this is what the following verses say.
Verse 9, the Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks, and goods as plunder.
They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled as well as all their camps.
They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals, and brought the captives, spoils, and plunder to Moses and Eleazar and the Israelite assembly and their camp on the plains of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho.
I'm going to skip forward a little bit.
Moses gets mad in verse 15.
Have you allowed all the women to live?
He asked them.
They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that the plague struck the Lord's people.
Now kill all the boys and kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
I know I said Leviticus had the most problematic verse, and there's still verses coming in Deuteronomy that are going to give it a run for its money, but I wonder if Numbers 31 isn't absolutely the worst.
You have the soldiers, 12,000 of them on their own, who have just committed mass genocide.
You know, taking no captures, leaving no elderly men alive or anything like that, burning the camp, burning the tents, etc.
Taking the livestock.
It's a death sentence if there was anyone left, which there isn't.
And the soldiers think, well, let's at least take women and children, right?
Look at us, we're so good.
And they come back with the women and children, and they'll probably just make them all slaves, which is going to be terrible.
And this is something, too, that people try to talk about from the Leviticus verse when it says, go and buy slaves from neighboring nations, like, oh, they weren't making slaves, they were just buying people that were already slaves, as if that's somehow some kind of a justification.
But they just went and attacked a people group and brought these people back as plunder.
They're going to use these people however they want.
And Moses says, this is ridiculous.
These are the bad people.
These women tempted us away and God punished us the first time.
Kill all the women.
Wait, wait, wait.
Not all the women.
How can we salvage this?
Just keep the virgins.
Keep the female children.
Oh, but God's a good God, he was sparing the children.
Nope, he killed all the male children.
Imagine that.
I have a six-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter.
Let's put this into practice.
I get attacked, they need my land, fine, war happens, I get killed.
And initially, they spare my beautiful wife, my six-year-old son, and my four-year-old daughter.
And then when Moses sees them, he freaks out and he says, that woman is evil.
Kill her immediately.
And that little six-year-old boy could be a problem for us in the future, and I don't even want him as slave labor.
Kill him.
And that four-year-old daughter, she's yours.
And some barbaric soldier who just fought and is covered in blood grabs my four-year-old daughter and drags her away to his tent along with the goat he stole as his victory spoils, his booty, his plunder from a day's work well done.
That's the reality of not just what the ancient world looked like, but what God commanded and endorsed.
My four-year-old daughter, to God, if we lived back then and were Midianites, would have been nothing more than the rape toy bonus prize for some soldier who just got done slaughtering other men, little boys, and innocent women.
You cannot make this make sense to me.
And if you are finding a way to justify this insanity, I would question why you're trying so hard to make what is so obviously wrong not only neutral, but just.
And if your answer is they were against God, I would say how?
By being born in the wrong place because God simply did not choose them initially to be the chosen people because they followed their own traditions and gods of the day that were very common that anyone would have been doing in their place?
How?
Tell me again about God's intrinsic design for human dignity.
I'll never be able to get past this.
I don't understand how anyone still believes this is a good God.
You want to worship him?
You want to believe the Bible is true?
Fine, fine.
But you're going to have to reconcile that and you cannot.
So on that dreadful, terrible, awful note, let's end.
This was the book of Numbers.
It is eventful.
It has a lot to do with Jewish and Christian history.
It is a pivotal part of the connecting links between the origin story through Genesis and deliverance of Exodus and law of Leviticus to what is coming for this established people group of Israel and now what all of the prophets and poets and New Testament writers will look largest world religion of all time.
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Have a wonderful day and until next time.
Keep Thinking.