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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Adam Winn
My name is Adam Winn. I am the S. Lewis and Anne W. Armstrong Professor at Samford University and the department chair of the biblical and religious studies department.
David Wilhite
And my name is David Wilhite. I teach theology and ancient Christian history at Baylor University’s Truitt Theological Seminary.
David Capes
Adam, David, good to see you. Welcome back to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.”
David Wilhite & Adam Winn
Great to be back. Yeah, thanks for having us.
David Capes
This is part two of our conversation, so we actually introduced you last time. If you haven’t heard that, go back and listen to last week’s podcast, and you’ll get a chance to learn more about these guys. But we’re going to jump right into their book in just a minute. It’s called “Israel’s Lord.” The subtitle is really interesting to me, and it’s “Yahweh as ‘Two Powers’ in Second Temple Literature.” Now, that word Lord, when you see it in the Old Testament, sometimes it’s capitalized, and sometimes it’s not capitalized. What is that telling us, David, when you see it all in capitals?
David Wilhite
When it says LORD in all capitals, it means the Divine Name, what’s sometimes called the tetragrammaton, the four letters of God’s Name in the Hebrew Bible, of the Hebrew language that spelled out, Yahweh. For instance, when God appears to Moses, which early Christians think was Jesus appearing to Moses pre-incarnate. But when God appears to Moses and says, I am, that I am, this is my name. Yahweh is the name that people will refer to. But because that’s such a holy name, it’s common to use some sort of gloss over. In Hebrew the word for Lord is Adonai. In the synagogue, when you see the divine name in a text, you don’t say it. It’s too holy. You say Adonai instead. And in that tradition, even English Bibles have done that. We write the word LORD, but we do it in all caps to signify we’re not just talking about any Lord. We’re talking about the LORD, the divine name.
David Capes
Adam, when you see Lord in the Old Testament in lowercase letters, what does that signify?
Adam Winn
That is generally the word Adonai that is being translated and refers it’s a broader term. Someone who is a social superior. It could be a king, and a god would be a lord.
David Capes
This holy name becomes very important in the way it was treated, the kind of respect given to it, the fact it wasn’t spoken. In fact, in some cases like in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other places it wasn’t really fully written out, or it might have been written in an older form of Hebrew, Paleo-Hebrew, as it’s sometimes referred to, I tried to describe it to students like you’re going along and you’ve got Times New Roman font, and all of a sudden you’ve got Gothic letters. That change is meant to indicate something’s going on. That’s what’s happening in the Hebrew text. It’s there to indicate Jewish reverence. We see early Christian reference to Jesus and to His names very often, and to God, the Father and the Holy Spirit, represented in a different way, called Nomina Sacra.
All right, in Israel’s Lord, you talk about a variety of manifestations of God, of Yahweh, and other ideas like wisdom, the angel of the Lord that we talked about last time, Melchizedek, Enoch, sometimes exalted humans. But there’s one, the Son of Man, which is fascinating. And there’s probably been more ink spilt over this particular designation than just about any other. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the Son of Man as one of these figures, which is understood as a way of the one true God manifesting Himself with the Son of Man.
Adam Winn
Tradition that’s going to find interpreted by later Jews in 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra starts in Daniel 7, where you have a Son of Man figure that appears, riding on a cloud, and comes before the Ancient of Days. There’s actually an old Greek text that says the Son of Man comes as the Ancient of Days, which seems to bring the Son of Man, close to this idea of the God of Israel. And then you have Jews that are creatively imagining, what does that mean? What is the significance of that?
And I think the most important text is probably 1 Enoch. And in particular [the chapters known as the] parables of Enoch. I want to say they run from 1 Enoch 39 to 72 and in those chapters, there are two figures that feature prominently. One is the head of days, which is almost certainly a way of talking about the Ancient of Days from Daniel. And then the Lord of spirits, which probably is another way of talking about the Lord of hosts that you get in the Hebrew Bible. So that’s Yahweh. Yahweh is being talked about, in some sense, the God of Israel. But then also there’s this figure, the Son of Man. And the Son of Man is so intriguing. Some of these categories are debatable, but we would argue these things are true of the Son of Man, and clear in the parables of Enoch. The Son of Man is pre-existent. The Son of Man is worshiped by humanity in multiple places, receives the exact same language of worship that the Ancient of Days receives, sits on arguably the throne of God.
And I have argued in this book, and then in an academic article, that the Son of Man actually participates in creation itself, in parables of Enoch. So, you have a figure here that’s doing many things that the God of Israel does. He’s creating. He’s sovereign. He is worshiped by humanity. These things all apply to the God of Israel. And we see this as an example of two powers. We see this is a place where the Son of Man is the Yahweh who is present, the angel of the Lord figure we talked about in the last podcast. That this is synonymous. And the article I mentioned before argues that the Enochic Son of Man is the embodiment of the Logos. So the Logos, the Son of Man, the angel of the Lord, this is all the same thing, and it is the second power that we talk about in our book.
David Capes
Jesus seems to latch on to that title as he is describing this mysterious figure and it seems to be he’s talking about himself. So why do you think Jesus latches on to that? And what did it mean for him to do so, both to himself but also to his listeners, those people in the audience, when he says, “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save the lost.” There are so many Son of Man sayings.
David Wilhite
Well, I can give you the quick version of an answer to that, but the full answer we’re going to give in our second book. The Son of Man as a phrase, we have to admit, is somewhat ambiguous. For example, in the book of Ezekiel, Ezekiel is called the Son of Man, and it just seems to me to mean, literally a son of a human, that makes you also human. You’re mortal. When Jesus uses this that leaves open enough room that some New Testament scholars can debate, well, he may not be claiming too much. But when Daniel uses this phrase, and everything in this Daniel apocalyptic tradition, as Dr Winn said about first Enoch and many of these other apocalyptic texts, I mean, it’s very common. By the time of Jesus, this Son of Man figure is something special. This is not just any mortal or any human being. It’s not even just a name for a messiah, although we’re assuming many Jews had started to link those two. But it’s not 100% clear. What is clear is the Son of Man in this apocalyptic tradition, is this person who’s been waiting in heaven, looks like God the Father, is going to come down and take care of all the problems in the world and be worshiped. And that’s really what’s so interesting to us with this. You’re anticipating where we want to go with this is. What does this mean for New Testament authors who see Jesus as the Son of Man and report to us that Jesus claimed to be this Son of Man.
David Capes
Years ago, when I was writing on this topic, I came across a book. It was called “The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God” by A. R. Johnson. I don’t know if you guys have seen that. It was published at University of Wales. It was an interesting book, because he was looking at many of the same sort of texts as you are talking about. Yet he was coming away with the idea of one in many as more than one. It wasn’t just necessarily two powers. There were, in fact, perhaps multiple powers. That the one God consisted of many manifestations, many ways of being, ways of acting in the world. Which would include creation, which would include executing judgment, and those kinds of things. Have you guys run across that particular book?
Adam Winn
I don’t know if it makes its way into our Bibliography.
