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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Jim Hoffmeier
Hi, I’m James Hoffmeier, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament and Near Eastern Archeology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
David Capes
Dr. James Hoffmeier, Jim, good to see you. Welcome to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” It’s great to see you back here in the library. You’re here to teach a course in our Lanier Certificate in Theology and Ministry course on the prophets.
Jim Hoffmeier
Yes, good to come out of the bullpen after sitting out there for five, six years.
David Capes
Well, you’ve been traveling around the world, staying busy.
People are listening to the podcast on six continents and not everybody is going to know who Jim Hoffmeier is. So, let’s take a minute to talk about—who is Jim Hoffmeier?
Jim Hoffmeier
Well, I was born and raised in Egypt, the son of a missionary. One of the things that I learned from my father was to love the ancient Near East, the modern Middle East, the world of the Bible. And as a kid, we traveled all over Egypt, visiting pyramids, climbing up pyramids, visiting temples. I went to Jordan and places like Jerusalem and Damascus and Lebanon and Cyprus and Greece, all as a kid. I developed this early interest in the world of the Bible, and, by extension, the backgrounds of the Bible.
David Capes
Now you’re married. Tell us about your family.
Jim Hoffmeier
Yes, I’m blessed to have the same wife for over 50 years now, two children, a son and a daughter. I have five grandchildren by my daughter and my son is working on number two.
David Capes
Then things get interesting at holiday time, I imagine. We’re going to be talking about your book, “The Prophets of Israel: Walking the Ancient Paths.” Interesting title that I’m curious about. You dedicated this to Mark and Becky Lanier.
Jim Hoffmeier
Yes, I did in part, just because of their gracious hospitality to me and my family over the years, but also, as it says in the intro and the dedication that it’s dedicated to them because they love mercy, do justice and walk humbly with their God. I think they practically live out the essence of that very famous verse from Micah, chapter six.
David Capes
And Micah is one of those not-so-minor prophets. I’m not sure where we get those terms but, we’ll be talking more about them now. You’re at the library to teach a course on the prophets as part of our Lanier Certificate in Theology and Ministry. I wanted to give a little bit of a 30,000 foot view of what you’re going to be talking about for the next couple of days in this intensive course. Because we’re going to be filming it, we’ll be making those assets available down the road, to people, if they would like to know more about the prophets themselves. And maybe, get a Certificate in Theology and Ministry from the Lanier Library and Learning Center. All right, how’d you get interested in the prophets and all
the Old Testament things?
Jim Hoffmeier
It wasn’t really where I started out academically. In my second year of intensive Hebrew, we met five days a week for an hour every morning for the whole year. We read large swaths of different books, but one was Jeremiah. We spent a lot of time in Jeremiah, which I enjoyed very much. Then my first year teaching at Wheaton College back in 1981, one of the courses I inherited was Jeremiah. They asked if I would I be willing to teach Jeremiah? It was on the schedule, but the professor with whom it had been originally arranged had to back out for reasons I still don’t know.
But I inherited Jeremiah, and so Jeremiah became my first love among the prophets because he, like me, spent a lot of time in Egypt. He at the end of his life, me at the beginning of my life. But I was fascinated by the fact that Jeremiah, of all the prophets traveled to Egypt. Most prophets did not travel outside of the borders of Israel. Jonah, of course, went to Nineveh, but Jeremiah went to Egypt, so that created a layer of interest in this person. So, I’m delighted to have taught exegesis of Jeremiah for a number of years at Trinity.
Then, when I was still at Wheaton, Dr. Hassel Bullock, was on a sabbatical to write a book, which became his book on the introduction of the prophets. I was tagged to teach his course while he was on sabbatical. So, I inherited the prophets and fell in love with them. And because of my combined interests in the world of the prophets, my focus has largely been on trying to understand the context, their world, the social, the political, the economic situations. Often things that happen in the prophetic books to the original audiences, understood it. They didn’t need a course on backgrounds. We do!
For instance, if you can imagine, we’re in a room of people, and in 1,000 years, somebody asked the question, where were you on 9-11? If that conversation is looked at in a book 1000 from now, people are going to say, what’s 9-11? They won’t have a clue. But when certain terms come up in the Bible, people of that time immediately would connect to some thought, some important event in the life of the nation of Israel. Sometimes a traumatic event. This is why it’s so important to understand what’s going on. Because the prophets speak into their context and sometimes against their context, being able to flesh that out a little bit, I think, gives greater understanding, greater nuance.
I look at the interpretation of Scripture like going for a swim. A child can kick about where the water is a couple inches deep on the seashore, the lakeshore. But then somebody can go a little bit deeper, put on a mask, put on a snorkel, and they can go deeper. They can see things you can’t see from the surface. And then there are those who want to go even a step further. They put on scuba gear, and they can really go deeper. I think studying Scripture is much like swimming, and you have to decide, what level do I want to be? Do I always want to be the little child playing on the surface? It’s fun. There’s a lot of good stuff, but you go deeper, and one of the keys to that, of course, is understanding the biblical languages and understanding the context and the world of the Prophet.
David Capes
You’re going to encourage us to do that. The subtitle of your book is “Walking the Ancient Paths.” Tell us a little bit about that.
Jim Hoffmeier
That comes from Jeremiah 6:16, which is my favorite verse in the book. So often the people of old were looking for a word from God, and the prophet is saying, the road is already laid out before us. You don’t have to look for a new path. In fact, new paths can often be dangerous. If you’re walking in a wilderness, or the desert, you want to see where the paths are, where the footprints have gone before you. Don’t go straying off. And in the world I lived and worked in was the Sinai. In the Sinai Peninsula, in the aftermath of wars for over 50 years, there are landmines out there. We learned very early in our work in Sinai, our archeological work, to stay on the path. Stay on the path!
David Capes
Because that way you’re not going to be blown up.
