In this episode Mark is joined by Assistant Professor of Hebrew Scriptures Libby Backfish to explore how we should approach New Testament authors use of the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly prophetic messages. The New Testament authors appear to be reading the Hebrew Scriptures in new and “out-of-context” ways. Libby helps us understand the meaning of fulfillment as well as the near and far nature of prophecy.

TRANSCRIPT

0:08

Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host, Mark Moore. And today on the show, I'm delighted to be joined by another member of our faculty of theology, Libby Backfish. So happy to be here. Thank you. Good to have you. And Libby wants to take a moment just to tell the listeners what subjects you teach here and what your research focuses. Yeah, so

0:25

I teach Old Testament subjects, I get to teach the freshmen intro courses I teach. Hebrew, I teach classes on certain books of the Bible. I'm teaching Isaiah right now, which is a lot of fun. I'll be teaching judges Joshua Ruth next semester. But my research my dissertation doctoral research was actually on the Psalms. I love Hebrew poetry. Yeah. And I looked specifically at how those Hebrew poems were translated in the Greek translation of the Septuagint. And how certain poetic features such as wordplay were rendered into another language. So I got to play with the Hebrew and the Greek and look at the poetry and then of course, look at all that rich theology of how God presents himself in Psalms.

1:05

That's so good, that's so good. And then it's gonna be so helpful for today for a conversation, because we really want to kind of look at because it's gonna deal with both kind of Greek and Hebrew, right? And we really want to look at how the New Testament authors are using the Old Testament. And that spans really the whole of the Old Testament, right from the Psalms to the Prophet, specifically, the prophets will kind of highlight. But before we get kind of into that, I did have a question for you. Do you prefer the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scripture?

1:38

Well, I think there I use different terms for different contexts. When I'm in an academic context where there are Jewish and agnostic. Scholars, I usually say Hebrew Bible, it's more of a neutral term. But as a Christian, I usually say Old Testament, it's what the church is used to,

1:52

right residents are used to, and I teach New Testament class. And I often tell my students, you know, by calling one Old Testament and New Testament is not meaning one is bad. One is good, right? It's not Oh, that one's old. I want the new one. Now, I have proposed that we change it a little. So I don't know if this will catch on now. So I propose that we keep New Testament. But if we change the old testament to like, the vintage test, Oh, that sounds very hipster. Yeah. readers. I could read the New Testament. But what about the vintage test? I like that. I think Zondervan could run with this. And we could have a vintage testaments do it by Christmas, we can do that. But no, but I agree, I also understand the wanting to broaden that focus of and actually maybe narrow our focus actually, on the original context of the Old Testament, right? reminding ourselves that this is the scriptures of the Hebrew people. Right, like, and I think that's helpful by by noting, Hebrew Bible, or by noting, you know, the scriptures of Israel like this, this helps us remind ourselves that, hey, this isn't just like part one of the Bible that is leather bound.

3:10

And it wasn't written directly to us, one of the mantras I say in my class is that the Bible was written for us, but it was not written to us, the old or the New Testament, which is why we need to get into that context and understand how those original readers and listeners would have

3:26

heard it. Yeah, it's so important. And I stress that to a New Testament. And, and I kind of stress it as this is why we we gently force you to take these classes, ri