A problem I have with saying a Biblical writer “was writing in coded language” is it gives the impression the writer made stuff up - whereas the claim of the texts themselves is that the authors had seen visions and they were merely writing down what they saw.
So the authors needed to interpret what they’d seen, just as much as the readers had to.
It wasn’t like the authors’ starting-point was a message and then they sat down and thought, “Now what symbols and imagery can I come up with which will hopefully communicate what I want to say”.
The authors couldn’t see visions at will.
So the initiative came from God.
He gave them visions.
Then they wrote them down.
The authors didn’t invent the symbols and imagery.
That’s the claim made in the texts themselves
The prophets said they ‘saw’ visions, and they wrote what they saw. Either that’s true or they were lying.
Whenever the Bible tells a parable, it usually states so.
But as for the prophets, they said they really saw these visions!
If the prophets had been making it up, they wouldn’t have had to inquire of the Lord about what their own prophecies had meant.
But Peter said the prophets themselves inquired about what the revelations they themselves had been given meant.
So it’s not just a Western literalist thing to think the prophets really saw visions - unless Peter also was a Western literalist thinker ahead of his times.
So the prophets weren’t making stuff up just to fit some established genre. They really saw visions, and they wrote what they saw - and they themselves afterwards had to inquire what it meant!
And Jesus really thought Moses wrote Genesis. Not some much later figure writing to adapt to some alleged Babylonian-era genre of writing.
Even if Genesis 1 was employing some alleged genre, Exodus was written by the same person who compiled Genesis (Moses, which Jesus accepted) and Moses says in Exodus that heaven and earth and all that are in them were made in six days. He says that in straight prose!
So that serves as a commentary on Genesis 1, by the same author.
It denies the gap-theory between Gen.1:1 and the rest of the chapter.
And as an internal commentary on Genesis 1, it also doesn’t say anything other than that the totality of creation only took six days.
I don’t feel confronted in my world with evidence for Darwin’s theory of a single origin of species. So I don’t feel a need to reconcile the Bible with his theory.
And old-earth creationism doesn’t seem to me to eliminate conflict with popular modern scientific theories: it only replaces some of the conflict with new conflict!
(Like, the order of events in an old earth take on Genesis 1 still don’t fit some popular modern hypotheses about the geologic timetable anyway.)
The earth’s atmosphere isn’t made of iron. But Moses wasn’t told that it was: and it is hard enough.
Hard enough to melt meteors.
Hard enough to prevent radiation.
Hard enough that a re-entering space-craft can ‘bounce’ off it - or burn up - if not entering on the right angle.
Moses was evidently compiling documents. But the documents were described as genealogies and generations - not as parables.
When a prophet included a parable, he stated that it was a parable.
But when he saw a vision, he said that he saw a vision.
A vision isn’t made-up, but it doesn’t only have to be about concrete things. They can have meanings that aren’t material. So this doesn’t imply Dispensationalism.
Maybe because I’m a Continuationist not a Cessationist, I’m comfortable accepting that the prophets really saw visions.
So, my starting-point when reading prophecy or Genesis is not one that assumes the supernatural can’t have been involved.
If there was influence between the Old Testament and Babylonian-era writings, what if the influence went the other way?
After all, two or three kings in a row each wrote decrees to every nation under heaven in every language declaring God’s wonders and ordering everyone everywhere, with death-threats, to worship the God of Israel - and as a result many of the peoples became Jews - across lands spanning from Ethiopia to India!
So there could have been - would have been - a lot of influence from the Bible on those societies - not just the other way around.
Besides, even if there wasn’t influence from the Bible to those nations’ own writings, still I think those nations could have retained semblances of Bible truths from even further back.
(Like Chinese characters reflect Bible stories, from way before modern missionaries came to China.)
So similarity didn’t necessarily mean influence.
I also don’t think, if the Bible stories were just made up in Babylon, that it could have suddenly gained enough traction with the Jews themselves to inspire them to leave their lands at great risk and return to Israel and found what would have been a new religion for them if the Bible stories only originated in Babylonian times.
But if the older Bible stories had already been part of Israel before they went into captivity, and they really believed it, and then their prophets saw more visions while in captivity, and Jewry also influenced all 127 of the member-provinces, then it makes better sense of the return from captivity and subsequent history of Judaism.
And then all the way into the first century AD, that take and that history is affirmed (by the New Testament, and other sources).
So I’m not convinced that unearthing a piece of Babylonian work is now meant to shape what the whole of Bible Prophecy means.
Better to understand Bible Prophecy on its own terms and with its own claims, with history, I think - rather than in a humanistic sense alone. Because the mere humanistic approach doesn’t seem to me to make as good a sense of the history.
(In the same way that humanistic explanations for the resurrection don’t make as good a sense of the subsequent emergence of the Church - the ‘Babylon-genre explanation of Israel’s Scriptures’ doesn’t seem to me to explain the existence and history and hopes of Israel so well.)
Both the history of Israel and the birth of Christianity is best explained if the supernatural occurrences described in both the old and new testaments really did happen.
And that’s not hard for me to believe, because as a Continuationist not a Cessationist I am experiencing the supernatural and I see the Scriptures as providing for those experiences to happen.
It doesn’t have to imply Dispensationalism though.
So far I don’t think Dispensationalism is quite the claim the apostles were making.
I think their claim (about Jesus, about their gospel) was more radical than that and more directly linked to the story and Scriptures of Israel. The good news of the kingdom of God.
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