BEMA 115: 5 Loaves, 2 Fish, and 1 Big Lesson

Transcription Status

20 Aug 23 — Initial public release

16 May 23 — Transcript approved for release

5 Loaves, 2 Fish, and 1 Big Lesson

Brent Billings: This is The BEMA Podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we look at Jesus’s time in Nazareth, pass briefly through the beheading of John the Baptist, and land in the story of feeding the 5,000.

Marty Solomon: That’s right. That’s our goal. We got to get to the feeding of the 5,000 today, and that means I got to pick. We got three stories. I can only spend time on one of the first two. We got to roll. We are picking the Nazareth story.

Brent: Before we jump into it, we have a special guest today.

Marty: Yet again.

Brent: Dr. Christopher Gambino.

Dr. Christopher Gambino: Hello.

Marty: Dr. Christopher Gambino. He’s the most educated person we’ve had in this room.

Brent: By far.

Marty: Yes [laughs], pretty much.

Brent: Yes.

Marty: That’s not to say anything negative or against any of the other people that we’ve had in the room, but that would include Brent Billings and myself. I know Jim Feicht, he’s got a Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks.

Brent: There you go.

Marty: That’s for you, Jimbo.

Brent: Chris’s counterpart, actually, has come before him earlier in Session 3.

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: Megan Gambino.

Marty: Yes.

Brent: They’re two of the most spitfire people I know. I feel in different ways, but—

Marty: Absolutely.

Brent: I’m looking forward to what we get out of Chris in this episode.

Marty: That’s going to be pretty good. Buckle up, everybody. No telling where we’re headed.

Brent: Let’s do it.

Marty: Let’s see here. Let’s dive right in. Every Verse™, right, Brent Billings?

Brent: Every Verse™

Marty: Chris is going to get started here. He’s got the last bit of Matthew 13.

Chris: Here we go. When Jesus had finished these parables, he left there. He went to his hometown and began to teach them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished and said, “How did this wisdom and these miracles come to him? Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother called Mary, and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, aren’t they all with us? So where does he get all these things?” And they were offended by him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his household.” And he did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief.

Marty: Now, Matthew really condenses as part of the story, and it could be that this is a different story. As we talked about, we set out to not harmonize the Gospels. As we talked about, every now and then, you have that conversation of trying to take these different accounts and see which one is a part of the other. It’s possible, these are two different accounts, or two different events, or two different visits to Nazareth.

It reads to me that this is a condensed version of a more full version that we have in the Gospel of Luke. This is going to be one situation where we’re going to jump over to Luke. Brent, if you don’t mind, how about you read for us the Luke—let’s see what we got. Luke Chapter 4, we’re going to be looking at verses 14–30.

Brent: Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day, he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.

Marty: Okay, so stop right there. Jesus goes to his hometown, and we’ve talked about synagogue before, Brent, and I can remember we said. Can you remember either from our podcast or previous discussions, what special job does the rabbi have when he goes to synagogue?

Brent: That’s a great question.

Marty: It’s kind of a trick question.

Brent: I was going to say, as far as reading, the vast majority of what’s happening there is reading the Text with a small bit of commentary at the very end.

Marty: Yes, is the rabbi…?

Brent: That’s not the rabbi’s typical role.

Marty: Right, because actually, there’s only one synagogue where Jesus will actually read the Text, the portion, that was assigned to him, and that’s the synagogue he grew up in, what’s interesting about the synagogue system was that rabbis were no more different than the other member of the community. The only synagogue that Jesus would have read in.

Now, he goes to the synagogues to teach all the time just in the building, or after service, but as far as the liturgical service of your synagogue worship, and the reading that happens there, the only synagogue Jesus is going to read in is the one he grew up in, in Nazareth. In fact, I would think that Jesus went back to Nazareth because he knew that it was his turn.

He had been assigned the reading for that day, and in this case, it’s the haftarah reading. If you go back to that Luke podcast that we had, we talked about parashah and haftarah. As we looked at M. D. Goulder’s work, as he thought it surrounded, as far as—at least the rest of our conversation around the Gospel of Luke. There are parashah reading that would have happened every week.

Brent: That’s the portion out of Torah.

Marty: Portion of Torah, the Books of Moses, and it takes you to the Books of Moses every—Chris knows this. How long does it take you to read through the Books of Moses?

Chris: They are set up to be read through in 52 weeks.

Marty: 52 weeks, one year. One year’s worth of reading gets you through the Torah, and that’s your parashah reading. Then there’s a second reading in every synagogue service, which is the haftarah, and the haftarah reading takes you on what kind of a cycle? Chris?

Chris: I think it’s about an every-three-year cycle.

Marty: Every three years. Every year you’re going through the Books of Moses, and every three years, you’re making it through the haftarah, which is the rest of the Books of Tanakh, but not every verse. That will actually be relevant here in just a moment, but I asked Chris he knew that because, Chris, you have a blog. Tell us about this blog that you have.

Chris: Yes, it’s a spin-off of the roots and the tools I got given here from the BEMA folks and the leaders here, but it looks to take readers back to the text and go parashah by parashah matching up, like Marty mentioned, M. D. Goulder’s work, the Luke portions to the Torah portions. We’re about to wrap up Exodus, and we’ve got a 52-week cycle. We got three more books to go, but every week is a Torah portion, and we match it up to the Luke portion that M. D. Goulder cites, and we try to see what those connections look like.

Marty: It’s parashah blog and it takes you—let’s see, sustainingnow.com

Chris: Yes.

Brent: We got that link in the show notes as well.

Marty: Yes, link in the show notes, go check it out and go back to the very beginning. Because there’s like an overview of how the blog operates in the four sections you run into every week and stuff. Go check that out. That’s why I thought what an interesting week for Dr. Gambino to be sitting here with us in the podcast. Booth. Go ahead, Brent, where were you now? He’s handed Isaiah. What did he have the parashah assignment or did he have the haftarah assignment?

Brent: Haftarah.

Marty: He’s got the haftarah because it’s not the Books of Moses, it’s Isaiah. He’s handed the scroll of Isaiah for his assigned reading and—go and pick up where you left off.

Brent: Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.

Marty: Now, this is an interesting reading here because we have not found a haftarah record. There’s two main haftarah records. There’s the Babylonian and there’s the Palestinian record, what they would call the Jerusalem—I’m now blanking on the term that’s used for it. But you have basically two versions of the haftarah, two different…

Chris: The Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud?

Marty: Yes, well, the assigned readings, which—are they found in the Talmud? They might be; I’m not sure if they were or not. They were along with the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmud. There was also their lectionary, that’s the word I was looking for. They had two different lectionaries. They’re very similar, but they were also different. Goulder talks about that in his book, if you ever get a chance to read it. Neither of those, that we are aware of, and maybe there were more, but we don’t know of anymore.

There’s no reference to any other lectionary haftarah readings, but none of them is the passage that Jesus reads a part of the haftarah reading, which is so juicy to me. Because I want to know, what’s his portion just before this, or just after it? Was this literally the only thing that he read? Or did Jesus read his portion and when he was supposed to stop, did he just keep going? Or did he totally ignore the portion that was given to him, and actually go to this section and read this?

Are these the only verses that he read? Because of these are literally the only verses he read, not only are they not his assigned reading, but he just chose a very, very select group of verses here to read, and then mic drops synagogue style, gives the scroll back, and everybody’s staring at him as he goes to sit down. You got some, Brent, I can tell.

Brent: I was just going to read on because you’re spoiling.

Chris: Spoiling, yes.

Marty: Yes. He’s giving me the eye, like, “Quit talking, Marty.”

Brent: He sat down and then it says, The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” There’s your mic drop line right there.

Marty: Yes, absolutely. That’s what we call the dereshah. I can remember if we even talked about dereshah when we did our synagogue podcast. The dereshah, same root word as drash. We’ve talked about drash, the dereshah as the short sermon, usually somewhere between 30 seconds and 90 seconds long. They read the text for 30, 40 minutes, and they give a thirty to 90-second sermon, which is the flip flop of our experience in the Western world but Jesus’s sermon was today, “The scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Brent: All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” They asked.

Marty: There’s that statement we heard from Chris’s portion from Matthew.

Brent: Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me—”

Marty: I got to interrupt you. Hold on one second. Read that last verse again.

Brent: “All spoke well of him”?

Marty: Yes. Just that part right there actually, “All spoke well of him,” which is a really key part of this whole passage, and I find the part that we all just read over and don’t catch. Matthew didn’t give that impression when you read it and yet in Luke, he goes to his hometown. He sets up shop and see—the whole point Matthew was in a hometown where a prophet is not honored. Yet in Luke, he goes to his hometown, he basically says, “I’m the guy. I’m ushering in the Messianic age.”

“Today, this prophecy is fulfilled in your hearing” and everybody speaks well of him. The synagogue was a buzz. Like everybody elbowing each other like, “Yes, that’s our boy. It’s Nazareth right there.” By the way, Nazareth—netzer—was basically Shootville. When people say, Can anything good come from Nazareth?, part of it is people viewed them with a disdain, like they had the arrogance to name their village, Shootville, in reference to the shoot that would come out of Jesse’s stump.

They thought they were going to be the place that Messiah came from and so everybody looked at that with this, “Ugh, those arrogant hillbillies over there in Nazareth.” When Jesus says this, everybody seems to be—they’re all on board. Now pick up where you left off, Brent.

Brent: I was just going to say in Luke, it says they were amazed and then they’re like, “Wait a minute, isn’t this Joseph son?” But through their amazement, and they’re saying that, but in the Matthew thing, it’s like, it’s so much more accusatory, like, “Where did he get these powers? Isn’t this the carpenter’s son what about-? We know Mary, we know all these people, and all the sisters here. Where did you get these things?” Then it explicitly says, “And they took offense at him.”

Marty: Somehow, he gets the offense here. It must be here in Luke, so we’ll keep reading up and see if we bump into it. We haven’t gotten to it yet, though. Everybody loves him at this point. It’s great.

Brent: Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me. ‘Physician, heal yourself.’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum’.”

Marty: He’s like, “Yes, you guys are loving this. You guys are all like—you’re signing up for the mission trip; man, you’re ready. You love this. You want to be there for this. You want me to do all the hometown miracles, you want the special hometown treatment.’” Jesus is going to go on to say, “It’s not what I’m here to do.”

Brent: “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “No prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon.”

Marty: Chris, what is it that stands out, do you think, to the original here? Is there when he says this story? Of all the stories he could pick and choose, he quotes this story and what do you think is the thing that jumps up?

Chris: One of the things that jumped out to me as I read this in the past, and as we go further too, I think it ties into the next part that he adds in, but it seems as though what Jesus is talking about is an invitation to the Gentiles. It’s a Gentile woman he’s speaking of.

Marty: Bingo. Absolutely. When they hear this, they’re wanting a bunch of hometown treatment. It’s like, “No, no, no, you want hometown treatment, but I tell you, Elijah didn’t go to his hometown. Elijah went to Phoenicia and ran away to the pagans.” Phoenician—that’s really bad. They’re like the capital of Baal worship and he found a widow in Phoenicia to actually heal and minister to.

Brent: It goes on. “And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed, only Naaman the Syrian.”

Marty: Again, I think Chris alluded to that, the thing that jumps off the page there, a Syrian, a Phoenician? Jesus is like, “I’m here doing a work for the outsiders”, and again, Matthew’s agenda being what, Brent?

Brent: The mumzer.

Marty: The mumzer, using in a poetic sense of, like, the outsider. Jesus is here for these outsiders. He says, “You want the hometown, but you don’t get it. You don’t understand why I am here. I’m here to pronounce this year of Jubilee that he could read from Isaiah, the year of the Lord’s favor, but I’m not here to pronounce it for you, I’m here to pronounce it for them and now things change.” Go and finish out this passage, Brent.

Brent: All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.

Marty: Which is—that’s how you start a stoning, so they’re taking them out to stone him and they’re so furious about this. They grab them, they take them outside of town, and when you stoned somebody, you tie up their hands and their feet.

Sometimes you hog-tie him, that’s one term I’ve heard, and you can push them off of some high building or a cliff and sometimes the fall itself will break a neck or basically kill them, and then everybody grabs a stone and you stand usually at the top of that ledge if you’re close enough, and you can all throw one stone, anybody that thinks they’re guilty, after the witnesses, you have to have two witnesses, in order to do that.

Two witnesses have to bear witness against them and then everybody gets one stone, you get to throw it or drop it on the person. If they survive, according to Torah, they survive and that’s God’s passing of his judgment. If he dies, then that’s God’s judgment. They took him out to stone him.

Brent: But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

Marty: The Star Wars moment. It’s beautiful; like, Jesus just passes through the crowd.

Brent: “These are not the stones you’re looking for.”

Marty: “These are not—” [laughs] This is not the rabbi you’re looking for. This is not the heretic, you want it. We picture Jesus passing through, everybody trying to grab him but nobody can. I don’t think that’s what takes place here at all. From a Jewish perspective, I think Jesus gets brought to the top of this cliff, the top of this ledge, the top of this hill and I think the very next move is somebody has to do what I just said? Two people have to do what?

Brent: To bear witness.

Marty: Somebody has to tell—what has he done wrong? He’s done nothing deserving of capital punishment; he’s broken no law. People are super mad; people are ticked about what he said. They don’t like hearing it at all, but he’s done nothing wrong. I picture Jesus standing there, like, “And why are we here? Who has an accusation? Anybody? Nobody?” I picture him motioning to his disciples, like, “Come on, guys, let’s go,” and he just passes through the crowd because they can do nothing about it. As mad as they are, they can do nothing to him.

Brent: Do you think the posture is more of, “You guys know your Text. Do you not realize the implications of what happened to it?” Or is it like, “You guys don’t even know your Text because if you did, you would realize what happened.”

Marty: It’s a good question. Maybe a little bit of both, like, “You know your Text real well, but you don’t really actually know it,” because this is a part of the Galilee, they have a synagogue there. They’re going to train up their kids. There’s a lot of debate about what kind of people live in Nazareth. That could be a part of it but these are going to be people with their Bible, they’re going to know their Bible, and yet Jesus is going to say, “You know your Bible, you just don’t know the mission,” and that’s what he confronts them with.

Chris: Then you have the layers of it because we’re in Matthew and we’re in Luke. As you talk about it, there are two very different audiences that were engaging. To go back to it, why is it the Matthew text leaves it out? It’s almost as if the Matthew text, the story is just in that community or something and they all know what’s being referenced or something, whereas in the Luke account, you’ve got to retell the story in a way because whoever the Luke account is engaging might not be as familiar with this pivotal moment where Jesus mic dropped it in the synagogue.

Marty: Yes, I’ve wondered that too because this story would fit the mumzer narrative quite well. I was always curious why Matthew didn’t put it in there and Luke did but absolutely, I’ve wondered that myself. I’ll have to ask someday, must be an addition by Luke, so who knows? Brent, take us back. We got some ground to cover. We’re back in Matthew, right? Matthew 14.

Brent: Matthew 14. At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the reports about Jesus and he said to his attendance, “This is John the Baptist. He has risen from the dead; that is why powers are at work in him.” Now Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, for John had said to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people because they considered John a prophet.

Marty: Two passing comments here. I think I say two things. One of those is just the authority. That informal, we don’t have formal rabbis, that informal s’micha that John has. He has the ear of the people so much so that rulers, tetrarchy, kings are unwilling to touch him and harm him because they’re so worried of what the people will do if they do that.

The reason that we have a problem here is Antipas has this weird relationship with John the Baptist because we’re told in other passages he loves to listen to him, he loves to talk to him, he loves to hear from him, and at the same time, John the Baptist is always like, you can’t marry Phillips, and people always hung up on the divorce issue and those kinds of things for this is just straight out of Leviticus. You’re taking your brother’s wife and Leviticus says you can’t do that because of how it robs, let alone the women in this story.

We don’t know. Maybe the brother was all okay with it, maybe the woman here is okay with it. I don’t know, but under Leviticus—John has confronted him—you are breaking Leviticus and the laws of Leviticus. I believe we’re going to talk 18, Leviticus 18. This is what’s taking place here. This is the context here.

Brent: Herod Antipas, Herod the Tetrarch, same person?

Marty: Yes. Herod Antipas is the one that got—Archelaus was the first one, but at this point, Archelaus has been dethroned, and I believe this is Antipas, and he was one that was made Tetrarch.

Brent: Let’s see. Moving on in Matthew 14 here, On Herod’s birthday, the daughter of Herodias danced for the guests and pleased Herod so much that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.” The king was distressed, but because of his oath and his dinner guests, he ordered that her request be granted, and had John beheaded in the prison. His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl who carried it to her mother. John’s disciples came and took his body and buried it. Then they went and told Jesus.

Marty: Ok, go ahead and read the very next verse, by the way.

Brent: When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.

Marty: Again, I don’t know if John the Baptist really is Jesus’s rabbi, but if he got word that his teacher, his rabbi had been beheaded by Herod, Jesus’s responses, “I’ve got to get away. I got to create space for some grieving and some mourning.” I just find that verse to be instructive.

Brent: I would say so. Even if he wasn’t the rabbi, they were still family.

Marty: We love to talk about the verse about how Jesus wept with Lazarus, and we just sometimes overlook how many places we actually see the humanity of Jesus and Jesus modeling for us what it means to engage emotion, and struggle, and just natural human experience. I love to point it out and we go past it. Let’s finish this up with the feeding of the 5,000.

Brent: Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns. When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick. As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late, send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.” Jesus replied, “They did not need to go away. You give them something to eat.” “We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered. “Bring them here to me,” he said, and he directed the people to sit down on the grass, taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves, then he gave them to the disciples and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up 12 basketfuls of broken pieces that were leftover. The number of those who ate was about 5,000 men besides women and children.

Marty: We got this famous story. At least I’m assuming most of us are probably familiar with the story about this young boy with five loaves and two fish and a sack lunch and this Jesus, it goes out to feed 5,000 people. Now keep in mind, we just got done with a whole chapter on parables and this deep rabbinical teaching, and we get to the story. I don’t want us to lose that because everything about a rabbi’s life is instructive. It’s all teaching. Everything that Jesus does is with intention and with purpose. Jesus doesn’t just heal an invalid flippantly just because he’s moved to heal.

I don’t want that to make it sound like Jesus is cold and callous, but there are a million invalids all around him all the time. Why does Jesus choose to heal this invalid and not that invalid, or to do this miracle and not that miracle? Jesus is a typical rabbi, and everything he does is done with an incredible level of rabbinical intentionality. Every move he makes, he makes on purpose. There’s a passage in John that I love the little flavor it adds. It doesn’t add with the Synoptic Gospels have to the story. There’s not too many stories that are in all four Gospels, but this actually is one of them. There’s a flavor, there’s a slant, there’s an addition in John that I think really shows this point that I’m trying to make. Chris, you got John Chapter 6.

Chris: Yes. Therefore, when Jesus looked up and noticed a huge crowd coming toward him, he asked Philip, “Where will we buy bread so these people can eat?” He asked this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.

Marty: Jesus, this Rabbi, has in mind when he starts this process what he wants to accomplish. This isn’t just Jesus feeling sad because 5,000 people don’t have dinner. This is Jesus wanting to do something again with his disciples. This is even about the crowds. This is about his disciples. On some level, it’s about Philip, particularly. This is what prompts him to do this. Jesus already knows what he wants to do, and he brings his students in for this next lesson.

Of course, we’re familiar with this story. He tells the disciples to feed the crowd, they balk at the request, reporting that they have a measly five loaves and two fish from a boy sack lunch. Jesus responds to their counter with a counter of his own, he tells the people to sit down, blesses God for the provision, and begins to distribute the food to his disciples who in turn, distribute it to the people. That’s important. Now, the reader is not told how the food grows or multiplies. I don’t know. Chris, what do you picture? Does he cut off the end of the loaf and the other end gets bigger? I’ve always wondered how this works. Do you feel like a napkin over it?

Brent: We know they have those baskets at the end. I figured they’re carrying around baskets and they can’t really see in the basket very well. They just reach in and every time they reach in, there’s another loaf.

Chris: It’s like a Mary Poppins bag.

Marty: I like that. Oh, I like that. Every now and then they lift up the covering of the basket to see one loaf in there, but there’s always one loaf in there. I like that. Okay, I like that.

Brent: They started with 7 items of food for 12 disciples to distribute. It already doesn’t quite add up.

Marty: Nothing about this is making sense when they get started. Which by the way, let’s go all the way back to the very beginning, Brent, what is it about this story that jumps out at us? It jumps out at us because we’ve been at this for quite a while, but what is it in the story that you go, “Oh, hey. There’s a lot of…” what?

Brent: A lot of numbers.

Marty: There’s a lot of numbers in the story. If we go all the way back to episode 0, we went through the fact that numbers are important to the Eastern mind because numbers symbolize things—numbers say things. I’m going to put Chris on the spot here. Dr. Gambino, what can you remember about which numbers mean what things?

Chris: We got a bunch of numbers in here. The first two, I think, are pretty telling what they start with. They start with the basics. You got 5 and I’m just going to assume that’s 5 Books of Moses right there. Back to the basics, the five books, and then they start with two things and there’s a big 2 going on somewhere early in the story, and it’s found in those 5 books with these 2 honking tablets.

Marty: Even more basic.

Chris: Yes. Even more basic. They’re just stone. You can’t get more basic than 2 tablets of stone.

Marty: Right. I like that. Okay. We got some numbers. While we’re here, Brent, let’s actually review. Let’s see what we can remember, the three of us—we can pull this off. I’m putting you guys on the spot. 1, what does 1 symbolize?

Brent: God.

Marty: God. Perfect. Excellent. 2, Chris told us it was the tablets of Moses. 3, what does 3 symbolize?

Brent: Community.

Marty: Community. They describe that a different way, whether it’s Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the patriarchs, whether it’s the Israelites, the Levites, and the Kohanim (the priests), they have different ways of showing how three-ness always symbolizes a communal aspect to whatever it is you’re talking about. 3 is community. 4?

Brent: The Gentiles. The 4 corners.

Marty: The 4 corners of the compass. Excellent. North, south, east, west. 4 corners. The Gentiles are from everywhere but here, so those 4 corners represent the Gentiles. 5, Chris already told us. 5—Books of Moses. 6 is the number of sinful—I’m not even asking you guys anymore. 6 is the number of sinful man, right?

Chris: Yes. Hand me 7.

Marty: Do it. 7?

Chris: 7 pagan nations.

Marty: Absolutely. 7 pagan nations, or on the other side, on the Hebrew side, what is seven?

Brent: Completion.

Marty: We think of what story?

Brent: Creation.

Marty: Creation. The 7 days of creation. 7 has a dual meaning to it. It can go pagan, it can go Jewish. Then we might say things like 10. 10 is 3+7. What would that be? Brent, what is 3?

Brent: 3 is community.

Marty: What are 7?

Chris: 3, perfect community.

Marty: Perfect. We’ve got complete community, 3+7 would be the completeness of 7, the community of 3—you have complete community. And when you have multiples of 10, it’s just going to increase that. Then 12, of course, makes me think of what?

Dr. Gambino: The 12 tribes.

Marty: 12 tribes of Israel. Some of these numbers, by the way, are very Jewish numbers, numbers like obviously 1, 2 (tablets of Moses), 3, it can go either way. 5 is a Jewish number. 7 has a Jewish element to it, for sure, with creation. 10 can go either way. Any of those communal numbers can go either direction. Then 12 is very Jewish. Those are very Jewish numbers. 12, 7, 5, 3 are very Jewish numbers.

And some of those numbers are very Gentile. 4 would be one, you said. You might say 6 at times would be a Gentile number. It’s really just sin. It’s really not Gentiles. It’s just sin in general. 4 is one and then 7 Chris stated right off the bat with those 7 pagan nations, Joshua 3:10 says that God said, “I’m going to go in there. I’m going to kick out these nations in front of you.” He lists the nations and there are how many? 7 nations. That’s where the 7 has that. There are these different Jewish and Gentile numbers. Now let’s take a look at those numbers again in the story that you read. This is a story full of Jewish numbers, 5, 2, 1,000, which 1,000 is 10 times 10 times 10, which is really 3 10s. It’s just like community on steroids. 1,000 is a way of saying all of them. In essence, nobody’s missing.

If we apply this understanding to the story, look at what happens to the teaching of Jesus. Jesus takes the law, the 5 Books of Moses, and the 2 tablets of Moses, which by the way, 5+2=7. He takes all of the Law—the complete Law. Thank you. A wonderful way of saying that, he takes the complete Law and he gives it to his disciples. His disciples feed the people of God. They take the law, given to them by Jesus and they feed the people of God, the Jewish people, by the way, the 5,000. That’s 1,000 times 5. It’s the whole community of what, Chris?

Chris: Torah believers?

Marty: Torah people. It’s a whole community of Torah. We’ve got Jewish—by the way, he’s in the Triangle. That’s who’s there. This happens, by the way, PS, this story happens in the same location that traditionally the sermon on the Mount takes place. That place that we called in one of our podcasts eremos topos, is the tradition. There’s actually the Church of Beatitudes that sits on top of the hill and tradition puts it there. Couple main theories of where it could have happened, but that’s the best one and is my favorite. The one that I think is correct.

Jesus got 5,000 people. He’s got the people of the Torah. He takes the law, this law of Torah. He gives it to his disciples who give it to his people. When the people take and eat the law that they receive from Jesus, there is more than enough for—how many baskets do they pick up? 12 baskets. There’s enough for everybody.

In essence, you could say Jesus’s larger teaching point seems to be. I am—by the way, why does he go up on a mountain? Well, that doesn’t really say “a mountain”—that was the Sermon on the Mount. That’s a stretch for me. I shouldn’t have actually gone there. That’s my little tidbit, I’m adding that. That Jesus goes up on this Mount. He takes the Law and he brings it down and gives it to the people. They sit in groups of what, Brent? He has them sit down, or Chris, he says he has them sit down in groups of—what’s the size of the groups?

Chris: Does it say?

Marty: I don’t know if it said in Matthew. It says in another story.

Chris: I don’t think it does.

Marty: Okay. He has them sit down in groups of 50 in other stories, which is exactly what happens with Jethro—this is a whole retelling of Moses. In essence, Jesus could be saying, “I am the second Moses”, so Jesus could be saying that his larger teaching point seems to be here. “I am the second Moses, when you let me interpret the law and completely trust me with it, there is more than enough to go around for all of God’s people.”

Now you don’t have to buy this number business quite yet, if you’re like, “Oh man, that’s a total stretch.” Usually, when I teach this when I’m going around and talking to college students or different people around the country, I do this lesson and people are just like wide-eyed, that brain exploding moment of, “Oh my goodness.” There are always so many people that are like, “I don’t know, that’s a stretch.” That’s okay. Hold on to this for a few more episodes. Let’s get to a couple more stories and see if you actually think this is taking place.

Brent: On that note, I don’t know if this was just me growing up, but for a very long time and embarrassingly long time, perhaps, and maybe because I got into this discussion of harmony ease and whatever, but for the longest time I was like, “Does Jesus just feed random crowds of people?” Was it one time 4,000 and another time, 5,000? Or were they the same thing and one disciple was just a little bit around the corner and couldn’t see 1,000 people behind a little hill?

Marty: Because there’s another story, right?

Chris: There’s another story. I just want to say they are distinct stories, so perhaps if you want to jump ahead a little bit.

Marty: A little homework?

Brent: A mini Hagah Project, perhaps.

Marty: I like that. I like that. Good call, Mr. Billings.

Chris: And we’ll get to it, because Every Verse™.

Marty: Absolutely, Every Verse™. There is one, just passing note, not really in line with the same string of thought that I had, but before we’re done, one of the points that I loved that Ray did when I learned this in Israel for the first time. Then every time that I was with him when he teaches on this, he gets son with his teaching and he says, “Everybody gets wound up about the miracle.” He says, “How many of you believe that a miracle like that happened that day on this hillside?” And everybody raises their hand, of course, or at least most people do.

Then he says, and how many people have ever worried about where their daily provision is going to come from? What’s around the next bend? Of course, everybody’s hand goes up and he says, “Then who cares if you believe that a miracle happened?” He has a statement. He says, “All the demons that were on that hillside believe that Jesus did a miracle that day.” They shutter to reference James, what good is it if we believe that a miracle happened? If it doesn’t actually change the way that we live? I’ve always found that to be a comment. When I study the story, I always think about it on that hillside.

We get really wound up about the accuracy and the infallibility and the this and that of the story. I know people sometimes walk away going, “Wait a minute. Do you actually believe he fed 5,000?” Well, sure, but the better question is, do you believe he fed 5,000 people, and does it make a difference in the way that you live your life when you walk off of the next hillside that you walk off of in your life? Do you believe that God is there to provide? Do you believe that his teaching is enough? Do you believe that when you let him interpret the law and trust in his way of reading the world, that he’s got enough to go around for all of God’s people? It’s always a little tidbit I’ve taken with me. Unrelated, but a good one. I figured I would close with that. Dr. Gambino, you got anything for us? Anything else rumbling around there?

Chris: I look back at Exodus a little bit and it really does look like these things match up quite a bit with what Moses is doing back there. There’s an invitation back there, an invitation forward to the next feeding, but also an invitation back to look at what’s going on in the excess storyline, which has a whole lot to do with Moses going up and down a mountain, several times, and a couple doses of tablets in there. Then a particular moment where Moses assembles the entire community of Israelites. I think that’s pointing to this story here. The Rabbis point to that, they say, “This is men, women, and children. This is everyone.”

Marty: Absolutely, they’re—man, you say that there are more parallels in this story to that. Absolutely. Which makes me think of it’s not only is this in the Text—as it always as Mr. Billings—but it makes me think there are even other stories that I would want to think of like Elijah or Elisha. Now I just got confused. I think Elisha feeds 100 people, which is a measly group of people compared to 5,000, but this story has somewhat happened before where Elisha has done the same thing. There are things in the Text that any Jewish reader would have looked back on and went, “Wait a minute. Well, that’s like this,” so to go backward and look at that because everything a Rabbi does is always in the Text. That’s all I’ve got.

Brent: Didn’t he just reference—I guess that was in the Luke portion, but he referenced Elisha and Elijah.

Marty: Good connecting.

Brent: Well, for more on what Chris was just talking about, check out his website, sustainingnow.com, The Shuvah Project. He’s also @sustainingnow on Twitter. Get in touch with him. Tell him everything that you think about whatever. All right. Thanks for joining us on the BEMA Podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon.