Seth Postell on the Art of Narrative Analogy

Hello friends, welcome to this episode of Textual Community. A podcast that explores the task of reading Biblical texts in light of the canonical collection and within a confessional community. In this episode I talk with Dr. Seth Postel about his new book on the art of narrative analogy. Seth shares about his personal testimony of coming to faith in Christ and also his lifelong exploration of the Hebrew Bible. In his book Seth takes technical literary concepts as tools and explains their purpose with clarity and enthusiasm. Our conversation here moves along these same lines. Thanks for listening. All right, well thanks for joining us, Seth. I'm excited to talk to you about your new book on the art of narrative analogy. It's a relatively medium-sized book, but it's packed with textual connections and things to consider in narrative and hermeneutics. So maybe as we start here, could you give us kind of just a sense of how you came to faith in Christ and how you ended up in your current academic ministry setting? Yeah, great to be here, Ted, it's an honor, and so I shared briefly in the book, but I grew up in New Jersey in a Jewish family, grew up going once a week to Hebrew school, grew up in an area in New Jersey that was very Jewish on my street. I think we had two families that were Gentiles, though all the other families were Jewish. I had zero, the exposure that I had to Jesus was probably, he was somewhere kind of related to the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, like I didn't, and I saw crucifixes at outside churches and things like that, but I knew nothing about Jesus and growing up also on my mom's side of the family. We lost a lot of family members in the Warsaw ghetto, and it was just kind of this assumption that, you know, that happened in a Christian country, and so it was Christians. And then my dad in his early childhood was also attacked for being a Christ killer. He was beaten, bloody, then ran home and asked my grandmother, you know, who's Christ and did we kill him? And so Jesus and our family, the only time I ever heard Jesus was, if my dad was really angry, and it was not a night's term, it was, he was just angry and he would say, "Jesus Christ." And it was, and so my mom in the late 70s, she, and I'll condense the story, but she met another Jewish lady that started to talk to her about Jesus, and she was mortified and curious, and so my mom started to study the Bible. And I think that really, I would argue that the moment a Jewish person grabs the Bible, searching, something happens. It's part of our heritage, and, you know, God has used our people to preserve the Hebrew scriptures, even when the church, you know, as in our unbelief, we preserve the Hebrew scriptures for the church, you know, because to us have been committed the oracles of God. And so there's something incredibly special about that. My mom started to study and read, and after a real wrestle of about three years, my mom came to faith, came home, shared it with my father, my father cried, and then he got really angry, and he said, "Don't talk to me about Jesus. Don't stay away from our son. I don't want to hear this." She started to pray for the family, and a couple years later, my mom, my dad got to a place where he realized that something had changed in her, and he said, "Okay, I see you're different. You know, why do you believe in Jesus? But please, I don't want to see the New Testament. I don't want to touch." We assume that because of Christian history and a long history of anti-Semitism, the assumption is that they must have gotten it from the New Testament. That's the substance, it's a book about anti-Semitism, and so my mom read to him Isaiah 53, and my dad got really angry, and he said, "Lorraine, I told you I didn't want to hear the New Testament." And she said, "Marie, that's on our side of the book." And that began a process for my dad, and he came to faith in a very dramatic way, and he literally in the middle of a church service started to cry so loudly that they stopped the service because he was interrupting. Because he was crying so, so much, just the realization that this man that has been hidden, and sadly by the church, he's been hidden from us, and you know, the veneer of the church unity, not the church itself, but the veneer of church unity, and to see Jesus, and so my dad came to faith, and then, you know, I was close to my bar mitzvah. I was about 12 years old when I started to, I heard the gospel for the first time, and really realized that, you know, that there was something wrong within me, and I needed help, and I prayed. But for me, my journey, it took me a few years. I had some really rough years. My teen years were pretty dark and difficult, and but God was faithful, and eventually was conquered by God's love. But I would say, if you're asking me, you know, how I ended up where I am, and you know, I live in Israel, and the academic dean of Israel College of the Bible, which is one for Israel's Bible College, I think for me the key began with a conversation I had with my uncle. My uncle was deathbed, and he was the most religious in our family, and he'd go to synagogue every week, and I tried to share my faith with him, and I was, you know, as I think was 19 or so, and he said, Seth, you know, the only reason that you believe that Jesus is the Messiah is because you have to read a Christian translation of the Hebrew Bible, and they've corrupted it. And when I get better, I'm going to show you that Jesus can't be the Messiah. And I realized having come from a reformed Jewish background, I could read the letters, and I could read the vowels, but he was right, I could not read the Hebrew Bible. And that was, for me, a moment in time when I realized that I, if I ever was going to speak with confidence about what I believed, if I ever would come to a place where I could be confident in what I believed, that I'd devote myself to reading Hebrew, and so that began my journey of many years of learning biblical Hebrew, and then after living in Israel, you know, I read a book by John sale hammer, and ended up going and leaving Israel for a period of time with study with him, Master's PhD during that time, you know, was able to learn Greek and aromatic, and, but all of this, none of this for me, Chad, is about the academics. I mean, it's really not about even, it's not about publishing books or publishing articles, you know, that's kind of a fruit of my journey, but for me, the journey is all about, is Jesus really and truly the promised one. If he's truly the Messiah, he's not just for Gentiles. He's for Jewish people too, and he's especially for Jewish people. And so my academic journey has been all about growing in my abilities to communicate my faith from the Hebrew scriptures, and also to see the relationship between the New Testament, the New Testament use of the Old Testament, and the Old Testament itself. And, you know, if I could say one more thing, my arrival at sale hammer, and then a literary study of the Hebrew Bible, a text-centered approach, was a crisis of faith realizing that the grammatical, historical approach to the text actually left me with no answers. Meaning that, you know, as I was reading Christian scholars that were very much arguing that, you know, the New Testament, you know, reads things back into the Old Testament, that there's a census planter, that there's an additional holy ghost meaning, that led me into a crisis, because I realized that that's true, then you need the authority of the New Testament to prove the New Testament, that my faith can't be defended from a close reading of the Hebrew Bible. And so that led me to a crisis of like cognitive dissonance, a crisis of faith, which led me to John sale hammer, which led me to then, you know, Israeli-Jewish scholars that are very brilliant and literary approaches, which resulted in years of study that, you know, resulted in the publication of this book, which is trying to help Christians that don't know the biblical languages to read the Bible better. Well, that's thanks for sharing that. That's fascinating and hopeful testimony of not just coming to faith in Christ, but also how it impacts the way you think of your own scholarship and study. That's really great. So when you talk about, like a literary approach, a tech-centered approach, is what you're talking about narrative analogy, or would you say narrative analogy is one of the main features of a literary approach to the text? Or how would you navigate that for someone who's just hearing about a literary approach and thinking about some of these techniques? How does that, how do those things relate to one another? So narrative analogy would be one of the tools that biblical authors use to communicate and to interpret for us what history actually means. So when we talk about a literary approach to the Bible, we're not saying the Bible's once upon a time, fairy tales. You know, what we're actually saying is that, you know, the Bible itself is the message of the Bible's conveyed by words. It's text, it's through stories, through poems, through genealogies, through law codes, and they have been carefully composed. And, you know, when we look to the meaning of scripture, we would argue that you're looking for the verbal meaning of a text as intended by the historical author. And many people, you know, when I talked, I mentioned briefly the grammatical historical method, which is really, it's kind of a way of looking, you know, it's reading the text and also reading the history behind the text. It's using the text as a window into the actual event where, you know, you study both the event and the text to come up with all kinds of meaning. But the literary approach or the text-centered approach argues that the text itself, you know, is revelation. It is itself revelation. It doesn't just point the revelation, it is revelation. The text itself embodies the inspired author's intent. And so, the way that you come to understand the inspired author's intent is you've got to see the ways in which they put the words together. You have to learn the techniques they use to constructure their texts, literary devices. And in that context, analogy is a crucial way of communicating meaning. And it was interesting as I studied for this book. I realized that, you know, there's a lot of work outside of the Bible on the importance of analogy for human thinking. And it goes across the board and into all cultures. And in fact, you know, one of the things I came across was that, you know, you think about a little baby that doesn't have any memories. Like, why? Why not? And it's because they're seeing things for the first time and they have nothing to compare. There's no compared experiences. But we are the way that we interpret things. The way that we navigate through reality is comparing things. One thing with another. We do it sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. And so, the Bible's history is built on this process of comparing the present of the author or at least the event or the character he's considering in light of earlier characters and in light of earlier events that are written in texts. And so analogy is it's all throughout the scripture. They're constant comparisons. They're intentional. And if you miss the comparison, you actually miss the point that the author wants to make about about a certain event, the meaning of an event or the meaning of a character. And what's interesting is that narrative analogy, Israeli scholars have been at this for a very long time. And also even in our ancient literature, the ancient Jewish interpreters recognized links between stories, parallel stories. And a lot of their commentary talks about the implications of parallel stories. In Israel, Moshe Galciel, and I think it was in the early 80s wrote an incredible book on narrative analogies or comparative stories in Samuel. And he basically convinced me, showed me basically through this book that, you know, the whole history is written with constant inner analogies between different scenes within the book. And again, if you miss the analogy, you miss the point of the text. And so I wanted to write this book as a way to help people explore the fact that analogies are all throughout the Bible, that they're intentional, and that they're essential for for discerning the meaning of the text. Well, and when you stepping back to the broader method question of a historical approach to Israel's history versus a literary approach, if you were tracking or reconstructing redemptive history, then one of the things that you have to do first is identify any place where the author is making a point or, you know, showing intention and then kind of, if you're, you kind of have to excise that, you know, and place it aside, and then focus on the flow of the events. But in a literary approach, it's not that you're ignoring the historical aspect, but it's those aspects that a historical approach is trying to excise are actually the things that you want to focus on the most of the way in which the author is shaping the presentation versus what we might know about these events that are being spoken about. So in some ways, it's a whole different shift of even the object of study. When you're focusing on one versus the other. So I would say that grammatical historical tends to seek to interpret the event, whereas a literary approach seeks the interpretation of the event in the text. In other words, it's a recognition that I don't have to necessarily create the interpretation. I have to find it. What is the meaning? The meaning is in the text, and I think one of John Salhammer's most memorable stories that illustrated the difference is each, you know, he tells a story of a father and a son walking hand in hand through a wall of water on the left, a wall of water on the right. They're passing through the sea, you know, the child is looking in all directions and wonder, and he looks up his dad, he says, "Dad, what does this mean?" And his dad looks at him and he says, "I don't know, son, we'll have to wait and read the book." And I think that that really expresses how our understanding of meaning is must be shaped by the text itself. How does the text tell us the meaning? And then again, the text is going to use all the different devices that people use for written communication, because it's literature. It's inspired literature, but it's literature. So you need to acquire the skills necessary for discerning authorial intent as revealed in the text. Yeah, that's a perfect example of that you bring up even just thinking about. Sometimes I encounter with students or just church members as they're thinking the desire to be like one of the eyewitnesses that are seeing these events take place, but one of the things that the biblical text even emphasizes is if we were just eyewitnesses of these events, we very well might misinterpret it and probably will. If you're just watching the Exodus happen, is this a migration? Is this judgment on Egypt? Is this salvation for Israel? It's like the theological and even historical point of what's happening is like governed and guided by, for example, the song of Moses that interprets that event right there in Exodus 14 and then 15. So I really appreciate that emphasis that you bring in general as an approach to the text, but then also now thinking more particularly about narrative analogy. In biblical theology, there's a lot of talk about story, but oftentimes it's very general, like just stories are important, therefore the Bible is a story, but your discussion of narrative analogy, it's almost like it helps you see not just the concept of story, like kind of floating in the ether, but specifically the way in which biblical authors are telling their stories and how they're communicating what God is doing in the world. So when you think about narrative analogy, what are some of the things that you think are most important to emphasize about what it is and what it isn't? There are a couple chapters at the beginning of your book where you really do try to give a sense of, this is what I'm talking about in it's similar to but different than other approaches. You know, it's been too much time on that because you get very quickly into walking through the fruit of this, but what are some of the things that you would say are central to this concept? Yeah, so the bottom line is authorial intent. In other words, you want to find the meaning of the text and so you're very concerned with identifying when an author actually reuses vocabulary, unique vocabulary, motif themes and plot sequences from another text. You want to be able to say, there's based on criteria, and it's obviously not a science, but based on certain criteria, you come to a sense of I'm fairly confident that that this story was written to be as a to recall and to parallel an earlier story. And then the moment that you identify that this this story was written as an intentional parallel to this earlier story then comes the whole notion of analogy in comparison. And then you have to ask yourself, why does the author compare these two stories? What is the meaning of the comparison? What is the point he's trying to convey by the comparison? So that's when we're talking about narrative analogy, we're talking about exegesis, we're talking about the meaning of a text. People are sometimes easily fooled into thinking that what I'm talking about is typology, and I've heard this a lot. And in my research on typology, the only thing that typology and narrative analogy have in common, at least most approaches typology is correspondence that you have like, okay, whenever you find a correspondence, historical correspondence between something in the Old Testament and something in the New Testament, you don't care what the original author intended. That's irrelevant. You suddenly start to get into the mind of God and you say, well, God meant by this. And so it's kind of getting into the mind of God. And very few people would actually argue that typology is an exegesis. They would talk, it's an extension of the text. It's a reading of the text in light of a larger canon. It's reading backwards into a fuller understanding, and more than what the, you know, the authors wrote more than they meant or they, you know, and that's typology. And I found that, you know, again, in my world, said, typology is a very weak argument for the truth of our faith, because it assumes that the New Testament is the word of God to prove that the New Testament is the word of God. It assumes that the New Testament authors have special inspiration to see things in the Old Testament that, you know, that if you go back, you know, I don't see it. And so narrative analogy is very much the claim is that we're doing exegesis. Now, it could very well be that I've misidentified and I've argued that there's an analogy where there is none. And so I'm being creative and that's bad. But the hope is to say that I've identified an narrative analogy and then to start to talk about its meaning means I'm tied to authorial intention. When I say authorial intention, I do not divide the divine and the human authors. I see that the human authors are inspired. They are inspired. And so and when you start to see the kinds of things they're doing, the literary devices that they're using, they're in full command of their material. They know what they're doing. And so we're looking for the meaning of the text as opposed to the meaning of an event, a supposed meaning of an event in the mind of God. Well, one of the things that I thought was particularly helpful is even just thinking about proponents of at least traditional typology on its own terms. One of two of the main principles at least of some approaches is that there's always escalation between the type and the anti-type and that always the type leads to Christ, which on the one hand can be really exciting for someone to see the relationship between the testaments. But on the other hand, it's not as that method is not designed to help you see how integrated and intertextual the Old Testament itself is, the Hebrew scriptures or as you point out, oftentimes there is not just the New Testament use of the Old, but the Old Testament use of the Old Testament or the way that the scriptures are already drawing on one another. The narrative analogy is a feature of the text long before you move into the way that a New Testament author is drawing on an Old Testament author. So can you give some, maybe some examples of the way that narrative analogy is functioning as a feature of the Hebrew text and that the implications are not only escalation, but sometimes what is an author doing with narrative analogy? What does it allow him to do in the sense of sometimes it's comparison, but also sometimes it's contrast and that can be the point. But if you're thinking only of escalation and only this overarching pointing to Christ, you might miss these places where the point of the analogy is critique or maybe even de-escalation from the greater to the lesser and not always from the lesser to the greater. So what are some of those ways that you see narrative analogy being able to handle an author's textual strategy a little bit better? Yeah, and if I can just kind of even just maybe a little bit emphasize the point that you're making because it's really important is that typology has only one kind of rhetoric of comparison and that's from lesser to greater. So the point of every comparison is from lesser to greater, whereas the greater typically replaces the lesser, swallows up the lesser, okay? There's no question that there are analogies whose function is, you know, point to something bigger, better, greater, and in times even things that replace older, okay? So, but that's one point of comparison that the text does, but oftentimes comparisons have a different goal in mind. The meaning of comparison can mean so for instance, and I think I talk about this in the book, you know, in the story of Rebecca tells Jacob to dress up to pretend to be the older brother to steal the blessing and takes advantage of the father's blindness and you think, okay, he gets the blessing. So maybe God, you know, maybe the ends justifies the means, right? But then we find out that there's a, you know, a reflection story where you've kind of got the reversal of some of the images that actually is intended to show that Jacob gets what he did, what was, he did something wrong in getting the blessing. And so there you've got, you know, Rebecca's older brother, Laban, who tells the older daughter to pretend to undress rather than dress, but to pretend to be the younger daughter, right? And taking advantage of this nighttime blindness. And so what ends up happening based on really shared vocabulary and shared sequences, plot sequences, you can actually see that that story of the reversal and the switching the younger with the older is poetic justice. He gets what he deserves. And again, in this context, the goal of this analogy is not necessarily a messianic prophecy. Now again, I believe that the scriptures lead to Messiah. I wouldn't be sitting here if I didn't believe that, but to kind of notice the parallels and then to find how it points to Jesus, you might miss, you know, the meaning of that story in the immediate context, which can also sometimes help you start to appreciate ways in which, you know, the New Testament appropriates and takes the New Testament. I'll give you another example is the story of David. And you look at the David story, the author of the David story. He constantly draws comparisons between King David and Joseph, you know, the way that he's the youngest brother, the way that he's chose. He's just sent, he sent by his father to see the welfare of his brothers at the battle front. He's despised, he's mocked, right? He's wise. He's, you know, he's good looking. So there are all these things that the author barrows vocabulary that's recognizable to anybody that knows the Joseph story. And so you see these parallels and then the parallels prepare you for one story where it's, David is not at all like Joseph. In fact, David is so much not like Joseph. He's like the woman who tempted Joseph, right? So you've got the story of, you know, David and Beth Sheba is a reflection story, a reverse story of Joseph and Potta first wife. And when you look at the ways in which David acts, and you look at the way Araya acts, Araya acts like far more like Joseph. Only he's even greater than he refuses to sleep with his own wife. David is the one that's trying to tempt him to sleep with his wife, just like Potta first wife. And so, you know, you see that this story is there to critique David to show that David is not the Joseph figure. Now why would that matter? Is because Joseph is already set up within the context of the eschatology of the Torah as a Messiah king. And so here we have a critique that does have Messianic implications, but David is not greater than Joseph. David is nothing like Joseph, right? And so those would be examples in the Hebrew Bible, you know, and then of course you've got examples in the New Testament where you've got parallel stories where the goal is clearly it cannot be escalation, right? So the story of Jesus going to Jerusalem and his trials, right? In Jerusalem, Luke, you know, in the gospel of Lucas is reappropriated in such a way that it tells the story of Paul and acts, right? So Paul is, you know, he's going up to Jerusalem and he's being warned not to go when he gets to Jerusalem and he's accused of the very same things that Jesus was accused of and the trial before Roman leaders and Jewish leaders and it's all there, right? So would we say that the point of that comparison is escalation that, you know, Paul is the new and greater Jesus that would be absurd, right? That would be absolutely or that he's a replacement of Jesus, he's the new Jesus, right? So then you have to say, okay, yes, Paul is like Jesus, but what is the point of that comparison? And the only way you'll understand the point of the comparison is to see his compositional strategy in acts and it seems fairly clear really from the beginning of acts to the end of acts that he's trying to defend Paul's gospel, he's trying to defend Paul's apostleship, which is constantly being under attack in the second half of the book and so in this sense of being like Jesus is crucial for a defense of Paul. What's also interesting is if you look at, you know, the way that Luke is structured and acts structured, you know, and Luke, Jesus is first sermon, he's he's at the synagogue where they pull out the law or they read the prophets and he stands and he says, you know, this is about me. In Paul's first sermon, you know, they're reading the prophets and Paul's invited to speak. It's the only two places in the New Testament, Luke and acts where the the prophets are being read in the synagogue and he comes up, you know, someone comes up. So that's Paul's first sermon is is a parallel to Jesus's first sermon. Jesus' last teachings in the in the gospel of Luke, he's talking about everything that's written about him and Moses, the prophets and the Psalms. You go to Romans chapter 28 and that's exactly what Paul's doing with his Jewish audience, telling them everything that's in Moses and the prophets and so these parallels, these narrative analogies are not there to show that Paul has replaced Jesus. He's better than Jesus. It's there to show that he's like Jesus. He's consistent with Jesus that Paul is not bringing a new religion. He is proclaiming exactly what Jesus proclaimed. He's proclaiming exactly what Peter proclaimed. Even though he was chosen as an apostle differently than the other apostles, he is just as much an apostle as Peter. Yeah, I love that I love that illustration or that textual feature in Luke and Acts 2 because one of the things that you note several times in the book is to notice the narrative context or the location of the narrative analogy. So here's an example of not only the narrative analogy itself, so drawing these comparisons between the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of Paul, not only their content, but also the act of teaching from these texts, but also this is the they occur at strategic moments in the narrative itself, which kind of confirms that the narrative analogy is close to the compositional strategy of the author in the book as a whole. So the beginning and end of a book, the beginning and end of a ministry of two of the most prominent figures. All of these are textual features that contribute to our confidence in discerning. This is really important for the author. So let me even jump in here and say that that's another distinction to say, say, typology and narrative analogy is that whereas typology looks for correspondences with little regard for the larger context, it's just, you see, hey, there's something similar here between the New Testament and the Old Testament and let's, you know, this must mean that God intended, you know, for this to point to Jesus. Okay, which may or may not be true. I don't deny that those things can happen, but it may or may not be true. But with narrative analogy, you've got a system of checks and balances because the analogy is never going to, it's never going to bring meaning that is not germane to the larger compositional strategies of the author. And so the way that you'd interpret an analogy and the function or meaning of the comparison is to spend a lot of time reading that analogy within the context of the entire book. How does this analogy contribute to what I notice going on in the rest of the book? And so I think that it's just a much more careful approach to the reading of scripture. And let me add that there, I think there are incredibly profound messianic implications for narrative analogy and something I also call in the book, predictive analogy where you have one of the functions of analogy is to use the past to point to the future, right, which is, which is, but it's textual and it's intentional. And I have found that, you know, like, for instance, I'll give you a great example. One of the big arguments in Israel among Jewish interpreters is, you know, the identity of the servant and Isaiah 53, right? Who is the servant? And a lot of scholars and Jewish scholars, but also, you know, if I were to hear of Isaiah 53 and I would go to my rabbi in Israel and say, okay, wow, this looks a lot like Jesus, who is this about? And he would tell me, oh, this is about Israel, well, how do I know this is about Israel? Well, if you look, it's, you know, servant of the Lord and elsewhere in Isaiah, you know, Israel is the servant of the Lord and here the nations finally recognize that they've mistreated Israel wrongly. And then they finally realize and they repent that Israel suffered for us, you know, and so, and here's the context and it talks about in 52 verse 15, you know, that the kings and the nations are repenting. And so what is the words of their repentance? I say, 53, we've treated Israel wrongly, but they've suffered for us and you look at them, wow, that's a really convincing argument. Until you realize that wait a minute, if you look at Isaiah 53 in the context of chapter 40 through 55, Isaiah's new Exodus where he's constantly describing the future Exodus by borrowing language, vocabulary, plot sequence from the first Exodus, you start to realize that the servant of the Lord and Isaiah 53 has to be a new Moses, he has to be. And so narrative analogy and predictive analogy actually, unlike typology that's kind of it's hard to defend, right? Narrative analogy is very defensible and I found that the more I've focused on narrative analogy, the more convinced I am that the New Testament authors have really carefully read the Old Testament and their arguments about the relationship within the Old and the New Testament can be defended by careful exegesis. You did bring some, let me ask you about this, the proponents of typology often critique a literary understanding of, we could call it narrative analogy, narrative typology, narrative figuration, things a variety of ways, but the critique from a traditional typology proponent of narrative analogy is saying, oh, this is, they only see this as literary, there's no future looking aspect to that. And then from the reverse side of someone that is seeing these literary patterns is really into narrative patterns but doesn't see this as a future looking aspect. So I see both some typology approaches that also are trying as hard as possible to maintain authorial intention and then those who see narrative analogy as possibly being predictive. So your category of predictive analogy kind of stretches the concept from what you were talking about earlier in the book but it comes a lot closer. Another way of saying this is, would you agree that when in your discussion of predictive analogy it's closest to what some people mean by typology but that you would still want to maintain narrative analogy for the reasons that you discuss throughout the rest of the book. But this is one of those places where there's a little more overlap and the main critiques of one approach aimed at the other kind of, you can kind of see that each approach is trying to grapple with something that's there in the text. Does that make sense what I'm asking here? So maybe I can, because I hear two questions, you're asking about, by virtue of the fact I'm talking about narrative analogy, I'm talking about something very literary. So what are the implications for the actual events? Am I simply throwing out the importance of these historical events? I think that's the first question I heard you're asking and if that's not what you were asking, I think it's a common critique. And then the second aspect actually has to do with the whole issue of prediction as it relates to typology. And so maybe I'll start with the second and we'll go back to the first. And so as you well know there are some scholars that really are trying to kind of rein into a more textually sensitive typology that's rooted in the text. It's commendable. I think personally, and this might sound pretty harsh, but I think that the word typology is an irredeemable word just because it means so many things and it gives so many false impressions so that the attempt to try to use typology for something text-centered is I think it's just a lost game. I think that people automatically hear it as a reading backwards or an allegorical interpretation, a spiritual interpretation, but the whole issue of if typology is added meaning, if it's a spiritual meaning of Israel's history, then you technically can't say that it's predictive because predictive for who? It can't be predictive for the original readers because the original readers wouldn't have known that it was predictive. They're just reading it as an event in the past or whatever. And typologists are pretty clear usually consistently typology is not an exegesis of the text, at least in so far as the literal meaning of the text. You could say an interpretation of the text in large of the Fuller Canon, so this whole approach that transfigural, right? But what I'm arguing is that by saying predictive analogy, I'm saying that there are texts that I can point to that the literary strategy of the text is to refer to earlier passages of God's great events or great figures and to use them to point to what God's going to do in the future. And it's part of their verbal intent, it's what they're intending to do. And so in that sense when I argue, for instance, that the servant of the Lord is the new Moses, I'm making a claim about the intentions of this historical author. I'm not saying retrospectively that the servant of the Lord is a type. I'm saying that the author, the author himself intended to present the servant of the Lord is a new Moses, okay? When Joseph, it's interesting in the book of Daniel, you see an extensive analogy between Daniel and Joseph in the opening chapters. And it's unmistakable that, you know, he's taken into the court of a foreign king. He's he's tempted, he withstands temptation successfully. A king has a dream, right? He comes before the king, the king's spirit is stirred within him same language. He interprets the dream, and then he's an honored, okay? And so you see that there's a connection between Daniel and Joseph, but then the question is, okay, what does it mean? What is the point of the analogy? Yeah. And the analogy then becomes very clear when you continue reading until chapter 7. Because what you see in chapter 7 is that Daniel's, this Joseph like Daniel, where Daniel, you know, Daniel interprets the dream, but then what ends up happening is the king in chapter 2. He falls down and he worships Daniel. He offers him sacrifices like he's a God, which is not in the Joseph story. He worships Joseph, Daniel like a God, and then Daniel appoints his friends over Babylon. You come to chapter 7 and what do you see? One like a son of man is being worshiped by all nations like God, and that he appoints the holy ones, the people of God, the saints over the kingdom. And so what you see is that this Joseph like Daniel is a within that strategy of the book, a predictive analogy for one like the son of man who gives the kingdom to the saints. And so you do see a messianic interpretation of Joseph within the book of Daniel, and it's part of the strategy. It's not, I'm not reading anything backwards in that sense. I'm looking at the function of the Joseph analogy in chapter, you know, of Daniel, as it relates to the rest of his vision, and it's interpreted. Daniel is, and by the way, he's part of the royal seat, Daniel, it says. And so Daniel becomes a Joseph like Messianic king who works in the book and that's part of the strategy. Yeah, not only a one-to-one correspondence with something in the future, but it's also embedded within the shape of the book. So it allows you to bring the entire book of Daniel along with you when you make that connection to something future looking than just a particular text or a particular aspect of an event that you're reading. Yes. And by the way, it's interesting because I'm, you know, we're talking Euro Seminary Professor, I teach in Seminary, I'm a Dean, and so we're kind of talking kind of high shop now. But it's really important to say that the book that I wrote is for the lay reader. I know that I'm hoping and praying that scholars will be blessed by the book, and I think they will, but I'm actually writing to people who just love the Bible, and they don't necessarily have to have the languages to do what we're talking about. And so my hope is that this book will reach a much wider audience and get people really excited about reading their Bibles. Yeah, and that's one of my favorite aspects of the book that I've talked with several people about already, is that well, first, it's an issue of our approach to the scriptures and disposition. So one of the things that I thought came across as I was reading your book as a whole, you are working through some of these major categories involved with the history of tradition, the history of interpretation, different hermeneutical approaches, but you are, it's not a technical monograph, but rather those things are in the background, and what you're doing is articulating this for some, as you mentioned, someone that just reads their Bible, but is wanting to know, wanting to go deeper. And sometimes I think for the typical church member, when they think, well, I need to do some deeper study. I want to get a grasp of it. They were our context often defaults to, oh, that means I need to get a better sense of the historical background. But one of the things that your book really shines and helps with, I think, is that, well, there's so much, there's so much more for us to see in the text, in the strategies of the authors, that is accessible to any Bible reader. And so one of the things that you emphasize is having theological humility, but also exegetical patience. So I see that in a few places, and then I'll just ask you to kind of walk through a few of the ways that you kind of tried to do this for readers. But one, at the end of each, at the end of your method, you emphasize the last category is maintain an open hand, thinking about, okay, I've seen this connection, but I need to maintain some exegetical patience and humility, because I need to test it. I need to think about it. I need to ask, do I see this as part of the author's intention, or is this something that just I'm seeing? So that element of your method, I thought, contributed to that. Also, part of what you do in the chapters, which is difficult to do as an author and a scholar and a writer, is to communicate part of your own sense of discovery as you're here's the ways that I originally saw these for the first time. And so there's a sense of excitement as you go through the book, but then also a sense of like, you don't only want to ride that high of, you know, you get a good, picking up good vibrations and you want to just keep going with it. You also want to check that with some of these criteria, because what we're after is not just a reading that is exciting to us, but that is also emphasized and really there in the text themselves. And then the final way that this helps is that you spend a good bit of time in a running illustration, a legendarium of illustrations from the Star Wars universe as thinking about, this is a feature of good storytelling that we intuitively recognize and experience, but then to see a, to see this as a kind of narrative analogy for what's going on in the text. I thought that those elements of your book really help you succeed in your intention to help Bible readers. And so I think this is a welcoming book, but it's also a challenging book. So as you were walking through that, what are some of the things you would emphasize for just someone who has read the text and is familiar with it? What are some of the strategies that you would suggest for someone? And what was your hope for the book in terms of teaching someone how to do this on their own? Yeah, so the book is, you know, it's a culmination of many years of thinking about narrative analogy. I've also kind of, through the book, I've invited you into the Postel home because this is how I've taught my children, how to read the Bible, and we use movies. We talked a lot about movies because I wanted them to get a sense of, you know, when you look at a book of the Bible, you've got to see how it all hangs together. Number one, in cases where you have multiple, you know, a series of movies, you're always asking how the later series relates to the earlier series. How does that series prepare you for what's next? And movies, really good movies, always in the Postel family. At the end of it, we always generates a couple of days of conversations. And where we kind of revolve, do you remember that? Okay, and so I really appreciate something that you did notice in the book that, you know, I've forgotten that I did that, but I did it very intentionally. And that is, I have a terrible fear that I create. I don't want to create monsters that people read my book and, you know, let this, the unhindered search for parallels begin. That scares me to death. It's like the cage stage of something. Yeah. So what I tried to do is to show that, you know, narrative analogy is not something, it's a lifetime of reading scripture. And, you know, you develop the skills to identify and find, oh, this passage is clearly related to this passage. I found, I found an narrative analogy. So now, why don't you take the next 10 to 20 years to discover and to think about what it means? Right. Yeah. Because you're going to need to read the text over and over and over again. And again, constantly trying to understand the point of the analogy within the, within the larger context of the story. And so what I tried to convey, and what I actually really met when I, you know, you talked about this wonder of discovery and surprise, to be honest, some of the chapters unfolded, weren't was my research. In other words, the wonder and discovery is real. It's happening simultaneously as I write the book, because I really did want to take people on my own exegetical journey. And that was intentionally why I also didn't want to present them final products. I wanted to leave them in the place that, okay, I think this is where we're headed. And now I need to think about it. And, you know, I shared my own experience of sometimes changing my positions, even things I published earlier that have changed my mind about that with the point with the obvious or I've refined my positions. And so narrative analogy is kind of like a, you know, you have a family favorite movie or whatever, you know, the Princess bride where you go back and you talk about it for years, right? And you talk about all the, you know, the different scenes in the movie and you reflect on them. And you, right? And I think that, you know, the Bible is literature, it's wisdom literature, all of it. And it's also, you know, when we talk about meditation and the word, the word, the word meditation is actually not quiet. It's talking. You know, La Gaut is to to murmur, to talk, to pronounce. And so if it's something that we don't just do by ourselves, we do in a community. And so I've also found that, you know, if I find something, or I think I find something, one of the first things I'm going to do, you know, I'm going to pick up my phone and call my buddy Chad and say, hey, what do you think about this? And that starts a conversation. And you say, hey, Seth, that reminds me of, and did you read that article? And if you read that book and it creates a really exciting discussion and open handedness is crucial. And that's, I think one of the things that bothers me about typology is it, it doesn't really need to ponder because that already knows the meaning of everything. You know, you're already, you're already, it's kind of like, you know, that, you know, everything is going to lead to, you know, one thing. And that's again, I do believe with all my heart, Chad, that, that the scriptures, the law of the prophets and the writings, they do lead us to Yeshua, to Jesus. I believe that with all my heart. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. But I think that this kind of reading backwards, it not only guts the Old Testament of its meaning. I think it belittles the exegetical abilities of the New Testament authors. I think we, we lose our sense of awe and our ability to be Bereans and to hear what the apostles are saying and then check the scriptures to see if these things are so. Yeah, that's excellent. A lot of things that you said there are very wise. One of the things that I like to, one of my favorite illustrations to illustrate what you just said is something like, you know, the biblical authors has taken us on a path. They're taking us on a journey. So if it's like the Old Testament is like a mountain range and it's possible to blow a hole through the mountain and put a bullet train through it, you're going to get to the same destination. But if you take this, the path of hiking it, you're going to see things that you never would have seen. And by the time you get to the other side, it'll take you a lot longer, but you'll be a different kind of person when you get to the other side. You can, though, you're in the same destination. And one of the things I liked about your book is it opened up that path of discovery of, you know, it's not necessarily a rigid, hermeneutical method, but it's a set of instincts, a set of practices that will enable you to think and contemplate these because one of the things that you mentioned throughout the book in each chapter is that it's one thing to identify the analogy, but then to interpret it and think about, okay, what does it mean? Well, as I love the way that you said it, it's like there's an exegetical process where you notice the parallel, but then to really kind of grasp what how that affects things and what that teaches us. Like you said, it's like, well, this might be a 20-year process of thinking about that. And sometimes in class, students have sometimes said, it's like you're seeing this for the first time or something. And it's like, as you mentioned, writing these chapters was your process of researching some of these. It's like, sometimes the answer is yes, I'm actually seeing this for the first time as I'm explaining it, right? Because part of that is, well, I've seen the connection before, you mentioned this into teaching through Matthew and seeing the backdrop of Israel's history of the Exodus out of Egypt, I call my son, through the waters of baptism, going up on a mountain and hearing the word of the Lord and seeing that sequence as one thing, but then reading through it, having thought about it for five or six years, and then explaining it and seeing another feature or another dimension of that and something clicking. It's happening for students, but it's also happening for a teacher who is working through those aspects, which speaks to both the, I think, the clarity of scripture, but also its depth there as well. So I, you know, many a time in class, and I'm sure you've experienced this where you're talking through a passage, and then you suddenly, it's like, together, you all discover something. Wow, I missed that. I did want to share it because I said that one of the things I wanted to redouble back on, and go back to is that the relationship between literary, the literary aspects of the text and history, and I think that one of the things that I don't spend a whole lot of time on it, just because that's not, you know, my book is not an apologetic to whether the Bible's telling us real history, right? But, you know, let it be clear to all my readers, I absolutely believe that the Bible is accurate in real history. It's depicting things that really were, and one of the things I've realized, you know, in doing my research on analogy as part of human cognition, and there's a lot of literature written on the importance of analogy in science, and in AI, and things like that, in ancient religions, and modern religions, and philosophies, analogy is crucial, and you start to realize that, you know, analogy, just because somebody uses an analogy doesn't, you know, necessarily mean that, you know, he's creating things that it's untrue, and so, you know, I can say, you know, that, you know, let's take the war, you know, the war in Ukraine, and I'm, you know, I'm not even making a political statement here, anything like that, you know, I'm just simply saying, you know, people are trying to grasp, you know, Vladimir Zelinsky, right? You know, and I've heard analogies to Winston Churchill, okay? Now, you know, whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I will say this, that that's what we always do, right? That's in trying to understand, you know, we're trying to make sense of Zelinsky, and so what do we do? We go back to similar situations in world history, and possibly similar leaders, and so, you know, just because I draw parallel doesn't mean that, you know, that Winston Churchill is a fiction, or that, you know, Zelinsky is a fiction, and so, you know, I would argue that, you know, just because a text is literary, it does not deny the historicity. There's an interesting, I don't remember where I read this, it was in one of the books I read years ago on, you know, the whole use of literary devices and actual history, and, you know, you can't, if I, you know, if an artist draws a picture of a landscape that really exists, or he draws a picture of a landscape that doesn't really exist, the pictures and the techniques are going to look the same, but what will matter is the intentions, and does that picture exist in a real world? And one of the illustrations that I heard that was really moving for me, I don't know if you've ever read Ellie Wee's book called "Night." It's a book that I read, it's a very thin book that took me about two weeks to recover emotionally from, and one of the passages in the book tells, he's telling an eyewitness account of a young child that's being hung from a noose, and he's not heavy enough to actually, it doesn't break his neck, and so he's watching this child hang between heaven and earth, and a blue sky's above the child, and the child is slowly dying in front of him, and he's describing at that moment how he loses his faith, you know, a child dies underneath the silent blue heaven, and somebody that was commenting noticed that at that particular moment, Ellie Wee's cell was actually citing a fictitious work, he was actually drawing a connection between a work of fiction and what he's actually describing, so he's using a literary device, but we absolutely know that he's talking about real history, he was there, but he's using literary devices to give us an sense of, to move us to consider his own understanding and interpretation of that of that event, and so, you know, I just want it to be clear so that nobody accuses me, I'm sure I will be accused, you know, and I, you know, it's fine if people don't accuse me, but I really have a profound, you know, a profound commitment to the belief that, you know, the Bible tells real history, when it intends to tell real history, right, a parable is a literary device that's not telling real history, okay, but whenever the Bible, whenever the Bible intends to tell real history and interpret real history, you know, it will use literary devices because that's how it interprets the event, but I believe that these events are true, and so, you know, I hope that will come across in the book, even though I only devote a short time to that, right, yeah, you set that up in some strategic places that I think that I think you communicate that well throughout the book in the way that narrative affects the way that we understand what God is doing in the world and how the Bible fits together, so I appreciate, I appreciate the way that you kind of helped explain some of these things, and unfortunately we can't do a five-hour podcast because we'd have no listeners and it would take up too much of your time, but I appreciate the discussion here, I could, we could do this all day for real, but the last, the final question I like to ask is a reflective one, and we've kind of hit at elements of this already, but there's a lot going on in our world, in our context that's discouraging, but what is something that you've reflected upon recently or experience that gives you hope? Yeah, so I'm sure given, given everything that's gone on in the world and, you know, some of the, where the world is that, particularly in the West and some of the conversations, I imagine that you've, you know, the way that you look at Israel is through the news, and I'm sure that your listeners, that's what they see, but as we well know, the news tends to report certain things and not other things, and what I can tell you, I think the most exciting thing for me is, you know, our ministry, it's, it's called one for Israel, and it's not a political statement when we say one for Israel, we really mean that there's only one hope for Israel, there's only one, and, and the people in Israel are Jews and Arabs, and our neighbors that are outside of Israel are Arabs and they're Muslims, and so what I can say is, with all the crisis and pain that's gone on in this war, before the war started, we have a YouTube channel in Hebrew called I God, and it is devoted to Hebrew videos that make the gospel accessible to Israelis, it's very much a, you know, it's dealing with issues and helping them contextualize and understand who Yeshua is, and so before the war, we had, I think, 78,000 subscribers, which is huge, considering there's only about 30,000 Jewish believers in Israel, okay? As we speak today, we're at about 780,000 subscribers, okay? And something happened, people are searching, people are looking, we also have Arabic content, we have a team on our, we have, in our media team, we have Arabs who love Jesus with all their heart and long to reach, the Palestinians, long to reach the gossips with the gospel, long to reach our neighbors with the gospel, and this is our team, we're Jews and Arabs, and we have seen incredible God working in incredible ways among Arabs who are longing for answers, Muslims who are longing for answers, incredible stories of people that are coming to Jesus, and so, you know, I would say that the most encouraging thing to me has been to watch in one of, just a very difficult time in our history, right? Watching God work and do amazing things in the lives of the people that we're ministering to, and again, to experience the unity of Messiah here at our organization, we don't talk about reconciliation, we live it, we don't talk about the, we don't just talk about the power of the gospel as something theoretical, we actually experience it, and so, I would say that that's something that I hope that your readers, your listeners, you know, we'll think about what's going on here and pray for the people here, pray for the salvation of Jewish people, pray for the salvation of Arabs and the Muslims in our country and the Jews in our country and the cultural Christian country, because there really only is one for Israel, we have no other hope. Yeah, well, wow, thank you for that report, and that's wonderful. May the Lord sustain you in that work. Thank you also for joining us today, Seth, I appreciate your work at a very deep level, resonates very strongly, and I hope this book is an entryway for many to see the literary beauty and theological depth of the Scriptures. Thank you very much, it's a privilege. Well, I'm glad that you're here with me here at the end of this episode. If you're still listening, you might be interested in a few ways to support me and the podcast. The first way is what you've already done. Listen to an episode or share it online in some former fashion. The second way is to rate or review any of my books on Amazon or Goodreads. My latest book is an introduction to biblical theology called One Grand Story, how the Bible tells its story and why it matters. Finally, you might also sign up for my newsletter at chedspellman.substac.com. At any rate, day of the Lentay, and if the creek don't rise, I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.