In episode 134, the final episode of season 6 of the Enter the Bible podcast, co-hosts Kathryn Schifferdecker and Katie Langston discuss a series of audience-submitted questions in a lightning-round episode with guest Dr. Rolf Jacobson.

Rolf Jacobson is Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary and Dean of the Faculty. He has served as co-host of Working Preacher's Sermon Brainwave and Narrative Lectionary podcasts. 

Questions addressed in this Lightning Round:

• Who was Cyrus?
• What is the significance of the cords in Ezekiel 4:8?
• In Luke 4:14-30, did Jesus read in the synagogue from the Septuagint in Greek or from a Hebrew scroll?
• Why did Jesus' miracles happen on the sabbath day?

Do you have Bible questions you would like answered? Go to our website at https://enterthebible.org/about to get started.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YZ_bmhZksU0.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Hello and welcome to the Enter the Bible podcast, where you can get answers, or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible. But were afraid to ask. I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker

Katie Langston: And I'm Katie Langston, and today on the podcast, we're delighted to welcome back our friend and colleague, Rolf Jacobson. Rolf is a professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary and co-host of some of our podcasts on Working Preacher. Right. Am I making that up? That's true, that's that's true. So podcasting pro right here, friends. Welcome, Rolf. Thanks for being with us today.

Rolf Jacobson: Good to be here

Katie Langston: Today we're continuing round two, of our lightning round. And this is when we take questions that come in on our website on Enter the Bible.org, which listener, if you would like to submit a question, you may do so by going to enter the Bible.org. And there's a form there that you can fill out. We try to get to all these, uh, all these questions, and some of these questions are great questions, but maybe not quite long enough to warrant a full episode in and of themselves. So we try to answer a few of them at a time. And so we have four questions to talk about today. And the first one is "Who was Cyrus?" So that comes in from a listener: who was Cyrus? Rolf, who was he?

Rolf Jacobson: Go ahead Kathryn .

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Oh, okay. All right. Cyrus was the, a warrior king emperor the basically founder of the Persian Empire who kind of conquered the Near East, in the sixth century BCE, including defeating the Babylonian Empire. And Cyrus was also , what we might call enlightened or ran his empire at least differently than the Babylonians and the Assyrians before him. And so he allowed. So the Assyrians and the Babylonians, who were the two empires before the Persian Empire in the Near East, they had the practice of of capturing rebellious cities, rebellious peoples, rebellious lands, making an example of them destroying those cities and then bringing at least the elite of the land, taking them out of the land and bringing them into exile in Assyria and or Babylon. So that is what happened famously to the northern kingdom of Israel. The Assyrians basically made them disappear from history, destroyed their capital Jerusalem, took, most of the people, or at least all of the elites into exile. And that's where we get the ten lost tribes. Famously also, the Babylonian Empire did the same thing to the southern kingdom of Judah in 587, 586 BCE, taking them into exile, destroying the city of Jerusalem and the Temple in Jerusalem. And then Cyrus defeats Babylon in about 539 BCE and allows not only the Jews, but all the other peoples who had been exiled by the Babylonians allows them to return home and even provides money to rebuild their temples. So Cyrus is known from outside the Bible. We have a famous archaeological find called the Cyrus Cylinder. I mean, he's known outside of that, too, but, the Cyrus Cylinder is this clay kind of cylinder that was discovered, I believe in Babylon, if I'm remembering right. And allows, has Cyrus' decree allowing these peoples to go back to their homelands. In the Bible, Cyrus is mentioned in a few different places: Ezra, Isaiah, Daniel and Second Chronicles, probably the two most significant places of those that he's mentioned are in Isaiah 45, where God, Cyrus is spoken of as God's anointed, even Messiah. The English word anointed translates the Hebrew word mashiach, meaning anointed one. And that God will use Cyrus to save God's people, not for Cyrus' sake, but because for the sake of God's people Judah. And then the other significant place in Ezra chapter one, Cyrus decrees that the Jews can return back to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple and even, you know, speaks of the Lord, the God of Israel as, uh, as the true God. Right? So, yeah, that's who Cyrus is. He's he's biblically speaking, he's the instrument through whom God restores the people of Judah, and brings them home from exile.

Katie Langston: So he's pretty well liked then.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: The biblical writers really like Cyrus. For good reason. Yeah.

Katie Langston: And that Cyrus cylinder. Am I wrong that that's at the United Nations as sort of an like the first example of human rights or something like that.

Rolf Jacobson: I believe there's a there's a copy, there's a copy maybe at the United Nations, but he, that original Cyrus cylinder is actually at the British Museum in London.

Rolf Jacobson: Have you seen it?

Kathryn Schifferdecker: You know what? I went to the British Museum recently, excited to see the Cyrus Cylinder. And it was on loan to Yale University, of all places. So?

Rolf Jacobson: So you could have saved yourself a transatlantic trip?

Rolf Jacobson: I could have, I could have just gone to New Haven, Connecticut, but they had a wonderful facsimile of it. I mean, I wouldn't have known the difference if I hadn't seen the sign that said, this is a facsimile, but yeah. Pretty exciting.

Katie Langston: Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah. Okay, cool. Thank you. The second question is what is the significance of the cords in Ezekiel 48?

Rolf Jacobson: All right.

Katie Langston: So the cords in Ezekiel 48. So I'm excited to hear.

Rolf Jacobson: In Ezekiel four one through eight, Ezekiel is commanded to get out his Lego set and build a model of Jerusalem under siege. And he's got to build the city and a ramp and Ezekiel is prophesying . So Ezekiel was taken away in the first deportation in 597 and then in 587 with the city was then it rebelled against Babylon. So the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar had subdued Jerusalem and taken away its elites, including the king, to exile. So he takes his army, he walks all the way back to Babylon, and they rebel again. And, in this, in that period, Ezekiel, from exile, he was a prophet called in exile, he warned the people not to, not to rebel. And then when they do rebel, he prophesies against the city, saying, it's going to fall. And here. So he builds this model, and then he said he has to lay on his left side. God says 390 days and then on his right side, 40 days. And that is to symbolize the exile of the northern kingdom, which it's 390 days, because he's counting the entire history of the Northern Kingdom as exile from the day of when this split came in 922 BC. And then that the southern kingdom 40 days on his right side to signal that the exile would last one generation, 40 was the, the number symbolizing one generation. It doesn't necessarily mean exactly 40 years. Interestingly, the Septuagint didn't know how to do the math. And so they changed it to 150 years for the left side counting from the end of the Northern Kingdom, which is sort of interesting, that they didn't like the math in the Hebrew and the chords. Then it says, Ezekiel is tied down during this time so that he cannot move, chained to his place. In other words, signaling that there would be no, the purpose of the cords is, really symbolizing the irrevocable nature of this prophecy.

Katie Langston: So that's pretty dramatic. Did prophets often have to suffer physical pain or do weird things as ?

Rolf Jacobson: The prophets, my teacher Jim Roberts, said, were unusual personalities. Isaiah walked around naked, you know, for a few years to symbolize what would happen if they rebelled, you know, Jeremiah wore the yoke of an ox to signal, if they rebelled, Babylon would put this yoke of slavery around the people. Yeah, they did lots of weird things.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: I think Ezekiel was probably the weirdest of them. He's kind of psychedelic. I'm not sure. I mean, like 390 days lying on your side. Uh, yeah. I don't I don't think that's. Well, it's not I don't think you're right. Like, maybe you lie on. Maybe that's for a portion of each day or something. But he he was called to do.

Rolf Jacobson: He was trying to get out of work. No. Yeah. Ezekiel Ezekiel is the strangest of them all. And in fact, there was a in Jewish tradition, you're not supposed to read, uh, Ezekiel until you're 30 years old. And as my friend Rabbi Citron said, and in these days of inflation, 40.

Katie Langston: Yeah. That's cool. I like that

Kathryn Schifferdecker: That's true.

Katie Langston: That's good. All right. Well, that's really interesting. Cool. Okay. The next question is, um, moving to the New Testament. It says in Luke 4:14 through 30. And I think that's when Jesus stands up in the synagogue and, you know, says that he's been called to proclaim liberation to the captives and etc. it says, did Jesus and that he and that this scripture was now fulfilled in him. Jesus was saying in the synagogue. So the question is, did Jesus read in the synagogue from the Septuagint in Greek or from a Hebrew scroll? That was an interesting question, and.

Rolf Jacobson: And I will amend the question before you answer it. Or from an Aramaic scroll, Kathryn.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Well, I would say, it's almost certain that Jesus was reading from a Hebrew scroll. And just because, even today in the synagogue, you read, the Hebrew, right? Yeah. I mean, it's translated. You can you can read along in a translation but you read you read the Hebrew, the original text of the Bible. There is certainly Aramaic translations, and Aramaic, for those who don't know, was a very a cousin of Hebrew. Right. It's a Semitic language. And certainly the New Testament writers know of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament. But I don't know. Yeah. In, in the synagogue, in a worship service, as it speaks of that when it says Jesus took the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, I think it's pretty clear that he that it was a Hebrew scroll, a scroll written in Hebrew of the original language of Isaiah.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Rolf, would you agree with that or would you?

Rolf Jacobson: I would agree with it. We know that Jesus spoke Aramaic because there's places where it quotes him as saying words in Aramaic, like on the cross "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani." And we don't know if he spoke Greek or Latin. The language that people spoke in daily use in the Holy Land in the first century was Aramaic, and many of them would have also been able to speak Latin or Greek because of the Hellenistic environment and the presence of the Romans. But I agree in the, in the synagogue it would have been, it would have been Hebrew. It is interesting that the Greek uses the word uh, the word that is translated scroll is actually biblion, book.

Rolf Jacobson: The translation that translates it as scroll is actually sort of doing the Greek a favor and using scroll rather than translating what it actually says: book.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: It's making a historical assumption, I guess. Huh?

Rolf Jacobson: Yes.

Rolf Jacobson: It's assuming the Hebrew.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah, yeah.

Katie Langston: Oh, sure.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah. Right. Because books, books were later inventions from scrolls.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yes. Scrolls started and then. Yeah, then books. But the interesting and even again even today in the synagogue you have actual scrolls, right? And you have books too. But the thing read in front of the congregation is a scroll handwritten in Hebrew, hand-copied, which is why they are still scribes today. Right? Scribes have the task of very carefully copying the Hebrew onto a new scroll. And those scrolls are kept in an ark, basically in a wooden box. And the, uh. Yeah. Treated with the utmost respect. You can imagine how hard, how precious they are, how long it takes to, you know, handwrite, for instance, the scroll of the prophet Isaiah 66 chapters, and to do it so carefully that you don't, you know, change scripture inadvertently. So anyway, uh, yeah, I think I think so.

Katie Langston: From this we can assume sometimes, sometimes I feel like I've heard that some people think Jesus was illiterate or something. So from this, this refutes that, right? Well.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: It says he read from the Isaiah. So I think that would pretty much refute that.

Katie Langston: Okay. Good. All right. Our last question here, is why did Jesus' miracles happen on the Sabbath day?

Rolf Jacobson: If the person is asking, why did they only happen on the Sabbath day? I don't think that's accurate. That doesn't say. It doesn't say that he only did miracles on the Sabbath day. If they're asking, why did Jesus choose to violate the Sabbath law and heal or do other miracles like cast out demons on the Sabbath? Jesus answers that himself, saying, is that, the Sabbath was made for human kind. For our benefit. It was not made to bind us. In other words, we weren't made to obey, the purpose of us, our lives is not to obey the Sabbath law, but rather the Sabbath law is to serve human well, flourishing, let's say. And that would include therefore, doing acts of mercy on the Sabbath, which is also allowed in most forms of Judaism. Yeah.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah, I when I. Yeah. In Mark chapter two, it's not, it's not a miracle he's doing in this particular place, but he's allowing his disciples to pluck heads of grain and eat them on the Sabbath. And, you know, strictly speaking, you're not supposed to harvest grain on the Sabbath. And so the Pharisees call them out on this. And he says, as, as you just said, Rolf, the Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath. So that's not to say that Jesus abolishes the Sabbath law, but to he fulfills the spirit of the Sabbath law. One might say, you know that as you said, Rolf, the Sabbath is made for human flourishing. And, whenever I, whenever I teach one of these controversies stories, I think about, one of the scrolls of the Dead Sea Scrolls that, in which that particular Jewish sect, the people who lived at Qumran by the Dead Sea, were even stricter than the Pharisees and the Sadducees and forgetting which scroll it is, I think it's the order of the community. The community rule says something like if an animal falls into a pit on the Sabbath, you can't lift it out. If a human being falls in a pit on the Sabbath, you can lift him out. But only if you happen to be carrying rope with you, or can't, don't have to go too far to get rope to to get that person out. So.

Katie Langston: So one must always carry rope on one's person on the Sabbath day, just in case.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Apparently in case your neighbor falls into a pit. So, yeah. So, those differing interpretations of the Sabbath law. But, um, says the Sabbath is made for human flourishing. So of course healing would be something to do on the Sabbath.

Katie Langston: Well, thank you both so much. This has been awesome. And thank you to our listeners who submitted such interesting questions. A nd you can get more content like this on Enter the Bible. org where we have blog posts, resources, commentaries, outlines and deep dives into every book of the Bible. Uh, and videos, all kinds of stuff over there. And of course, if you have enjoyed watching this podcast on YouTube or listening to it on your favorite podcast app, please, rate, review, like, subscribe, do all the things, and most importantly, share the podcast with a friend. Until next time.