Q. In Exodus 14, Pharaoh decided to chase the nation of Israel. The plagues had killed all the animals. Where did Pharaoh get all the horses for the chariots for the chase? Did enough time pass for him to regroup? Just wondering. 
Thanks for being there and responding to questions from your readers.

Thank you for your question. The book of Exodus does say that as a result of the fifth plague, which seems to have been a disease that affected animals, “All the livestock of the Egyptians died.” However, the word “all” does not seem to mean “every last one,” because before the seventh plague, which was a devastating hail storm, Moses told Pharaoh, “Give an order now to bring your livestock and everything you have in the field to a place of shelter, because the hail will fall on every person and animal that has not been brought in and is still out in the field, and they will die.” And God told Moses that the tenth plague would kill the firstborn of every Egyptian person and “all the firstborn of the cattle.”

One possibility is that when Exodus says that “all the livestock of the Egyptians died,” this could mean that “all kinds of livestock died,” that is, large numbers of the horses, donkeys, camels, cattle, sheep, and goats that Moses warned Pharaoh were all in danger from the fifth plague. It would be remarkable that a single disease would affect such a wide range of animals, and this would be a further sign to Pharaoh that the God of Israel was the true God.

Another possibility is that “all” is a generalization for emphasis. This is a common Hebrew usage. For example, Exodus also says that the Egyptians made the Israelites do “all kinds of labor in the field,” but clearly this does not mean every single type of work known to humans. So the statement “all the livestock of the Egyptians died” may mean that a great number of the animals that the Egyptians owned died.

Pharaoh’s chariot horses specifically would probably have been kept in stables, so they would have been away from the general population of animals affected by the disease and sheltered during the hail storm. While these plagues were supernatural events sent by God to chastise Pharaoh, they ultimately worked through natural means, and there were natural ways to avoid them. (For example, Moses warned the Egyptians to bring their cattle into shelter before the hail storm came.)

Q. Hi, brother. Peace be upon you. I was reading one of your articles about Domitian’s coins being (likely) the mark of the beast. My question is: Where can I find the information showing that Domitian’s coins “would be held in the right hand for transactions” and sometimes they were “worn in a band on the forehead” ? I found this article great, but I’d love to have the sources that can lead me to this conclusion, so that I could prove that point. Could you do this for me, please? Best wishes. God bless you in Christ!

Regarding coins worn in a band on the forehead, please see this article. It includes this illustration:

Regarding coins held in the right hand for a transaction, that is a self-evident practice in any culture that uses coins as money, as the Romans did.

Q. Most English Bibles translate the first word in the Old Testament, bereshith, as “in the beginning.” This implies that the statement that follows is telling us what was created first: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” So if this is the case, how is it possible that the Holy Spirit “moved upon the the face of the waters,” as it says in the next verse? The waters had not been created yet!

One may argue that the word “earth” in the first verse includes the entire face of the planet, including the oceans—the water. However, this only works in English. In ancient (and modern) hebrew, the word ‘eretz, “earth,” specifically refers to dry land alone, not water (mayim). See Rashi, who discusses this question and translates bereshith slightly differently. However my question specifically refers to the usual Christian translation.

Thank you for your question. I discuss essentially the same question in the following post, so I think that if you read it, you will find an answer to your own question:

Does the creation account in Genesis begin with matter (in the form of water) already existing?

It is possible grammatically to translate the opening of Genesis this way: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth …” At least two English Bibles, the Common English Bible and the Living Bible, translate it that way. But you’re right, overwhelmingly English Christian Bibles translate it as, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And as I say in the post for which I have provided the link above, I think that is the correct translation. The solution to the problem is instead that the ancient Hebrews regarded water as effectively equivalent to “nothing.” As I say in that post, for them, de aqua was the equivalent of ex nihilo.

Q. Mark and Luke both tell the story of Jesus restoring a blind man’s sight on the road outside Jericho. Matthew tells the same story, but he says that two men had their sight restored. Why is there a difference?

You’re asking about the phenomenon that gospels scholars sometimes refer to as “Matthean doubling.” This isn’t the only place where Matthew seems to turn one character into two.

First, in the story you’re asking about, there definitely seems to have been just one person involved. Mark even tells us what his name was—Bartimaeus. The details of the story are the same in all three gospels. In Mark and Luke, this man calls out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The crowd tells him to be quiet, but he shouts all the louder. Jesus hears him and calls him over and asks what he wants. He asks to have his sight restored, and Jesus heals him. In Matthew’s version, two men call out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us!” The crowd tells them to be quiet, but they shout louder. Jesus calls them over and asks what they want. They ask to have their sight restored, and Jesus heals them. The only difference is the two men in Matthew versus the one in Mark and Luke. All three writers specify the same setting, on the road outside Jericho, and the same time, as Jesus was heading to Jerusalem at the end of his life. So Matthew doesn’t seem to be relating a separate incident. He’s doubling a character in the same incident.

Similarly, Mark and Luke tell how Jesus healed a demon-possessed man in the area on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. They tell how no one could restrain him, how he came screaming out at Jesus and the disciples, and how the demons inside of him begged Jesus not to torture them. They asked to be sent into a nearby herd of pigs instead, and Jesus agreed. (If you’re wondering why he agreed, consider this post.) The demons left the man and went into the pigs, which all rushed down a hillside into the lake and drowned. Matthew tells exactly the same story, with all the same details, except he says that there were two men involved, not one.

A further instance occurs in the story of Palm Sunday. As Mark and Luke tell it, Jesus is approaching Jerusalem, and he sends two of his disciples to a nearby village to get a colt (a young donkey) for him to ride into the city. He tells them that if anyone challenges them, they are to say that “the Lord needs it.” They bring the colt back, throw their cloaks over its back, and Jesus rides it into Jerusalem, where he is cheered by the crowds. Matthew tells the same story, with the same details, except he says that Jesus told the disciples to get two animals, a donkey and her colt. He says that if anyone challenges them, they are to say that “the Lord needs them.” Matthew then reports that the disciples “brought the donkey and the colt and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them.” We can at least recognize that Matthew means that Jesus sat on the cloaks, not on the two animals at once. But this is still one further instance of “doubling.”

So what’s going on here? The best explanation I’ve heard, and I find it convincing, is that two is the number of witness in Jewish culture, and Matthew is writing primarily for a Jewish audience. He is the only gospel writer who records how Jesus reinforced for his disciples the rule in the law of Moses, “Let every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.”

These three episodes are all well-known stories that circulated widely during the generation between the time when Jesus lived and when the gospels were written down. The times and locations and even some of the names involved are all documented. So Matthew isn’t trying to fool anybody. If he were, he would make up stories that don’t appear anywhere else, so that no one could check up on him. Instead, he’s beginning with the premise that his readers will know the stories only too well, and so they will be struck by the difference in detail. They will wonder what it means, and if they read carefully, they will find the answer right in his own gospel: The testimony of two witnesses establishes a matter.

So Matthew “doubles” characters as a way of saying that these particular episodes bear witness to who Jesus is. Interestingly, in each of them, there is explicit witness to Jesus’ identity. The blind man calls out to him as the “Son of David.” The demons say, “We know who you are, the Son of God.” The crowds who greet Jesus on his way into Jerusalem call him the king who comes in the name of the Lord. So it does indeed seem to be Matthew’s purpose to portray these episodes as bearing witness to who Jesus is.

In our own time and culture, we might still think this isn’t quite proper. What right does Matthew have to change the details in a story from Jesus’ life? But if we can appreciate that he is making use of symbolism even as he otherwise tells the story of Jesus realistically, we can understand his purpose and accept his method.

Q. At what age did King Nebuchadnezzar get married? And at what age was Amytis married?

The Bible gives us no information about the marriage of Nebuchadnezzar and Amytis. Legend says that he built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon for her because she was homesick for the landscape and foliage of her native Media. But this is another case like the one I discuss in my post, “Why are the pyramids of Giza never mentioned in the Bible?” As I say there, “The Bible’s silence about ancient wonders doesn’t indicate that it actually lacks a firsthand perspective on the events it describes. Rather, the Bible wants us to ‘praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven,’ not any earthly ruler, whatever their achievements.” (And whatever Median princess they may have married.)

 

Q. Why are the pyramids of Giza never mentioned in the Bible?

That’s an interesting question, because those pyramids are apparently visible from Goshen, where the Israelites lived in Egypt. (See the photograph below from the Matson Collection in the U.S. Library of Congress. The photo is entitled, “Egypt. Pyramids. The land of Goshen with pyramids in the distance.”)

But let me try to answer your question. For one thing, the pyramids were constructed well over a thousand years before the time of Moses, so the Egyptians weren’t actively working on them in biblical times. Rather, the book of Exodus tells us that the Egyptians “put slave masters over the Israelites to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.” So the Bible does refer to major construction projects in Egypt, but it describes the ones that intersect with the story of the covenant people.

However, I think an even more important reason why the Bible doesn’t mention the pyramids is that they were assertions of power and even immortality by the pharaohs. Rather than acknowledge those claims and dispute them, the Bible simply ignores them!

The case is similar with another of the “seven wonders of the ancient world,” the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. While it’s unclear whether they actually existed, tradition says that they were created by King Nebuchadnezzar. While the book of Daniel describes life in Babylon under that king, it never mentions the gardens. If they did exist, the Bible doesn’t give us any evidence for them. It quotes Nebuchadnezzar as speaking of “great Babylon I have built  . . . by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty,” but it doesn’t provide any details that would glorify Nebuchadnezzar rather than the God he ultimately had to admit “is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes.”

So the Bible’s silence about ancient wonders doesn’t indicate that it actually lacks a firsthand perspective on the events it describes. Rather, the Bible wants us to “praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven,” not any earthly ruler, whatever their achievements.

Q. What happened to the Ark of the Covenant when the temple got destroyed? Did Jeremiah have any role protecting it?

As I write this last post in response to your questions about the book of Jeremiah, let me commend you again for reading through the whole book thoughtfully and asking good questions about it. That’s exactly how we should be reading the Bible.

Contrary to what movies such as Raiders of the Lost Ark would suggest, the ark of the covenant was almost certainly destroyed when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem. It’s not “lost” and waiting to be discovered somewhere.

We can infer this with a high degree of certainty from the biblical text itself, because it actually lists for us what the Babylonians took out of the temple before they destroyed it. We’re told at the end of the book of Jeremiah, “The Babylonians broke up the bronze pillars, the movable stands and the bronze Sea that were at the temple of the Lord and they carried all the bronze to Babylon. They also took away the pots, shovels, wick trimmers, sprinkling bowls, dishes and all the bronze articles used in the temple service. The commander of the imperial guard took away the basins, censers, sprinkling bowls, pots, lampstands, dishes and bowls used for drink offerings—all that were made of pure gold or silver.”

Later in the Bible we get an actual inventory of these articles, which “Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and had placed in the temple of his god.” This was the typical thing to do in the ancient world with articles taken from a conquered nation’s temple. They were displayed as trophies to show how much more powerful the conquering nation’s god was than the conquered nation’s god. (The Philistines followed a similar practice when they displayed Saul’s armor in the temple of their god after killing him in battle.) When the Persians conquered the Babylonians and allowed exiled peoples to return home, King Cyrus sent the articles from the Jerusalem temple back with the returning Judeans. There’s even a detailed inventory at the beginning of the book of Ezra: 30 gold bowls, 410 silver bowls, etc.

What’s significant is that there’s no mention of the ark of the covenant in any of these passages. The Babylonians probably understood that it was not meant to be a depiction of the God of the Israelites. If it had been, they would certainly have put it in their temple as a highest-value trophy. But they probably knew that the Israelites never had any idols representing Yahweh. Instead, the ark was a sacred object intended to represent his presence. As such, the Babylonians would not have put it in their own temple. Instead, they would have treated it as an object made of precious metal and cut it up or melted it down, the way they did the bronze objects. The Hebrew Scriptures don’t depict this destruction, probably out of reverence for the ark and its meaning.

But significantly, early in the book of Jeremiah, there’s a prophecy about the time when Israel will be restored and “all nations will gather in Jerusalem to honor the name of the Lord.” At that time,” Jeremiah says, “people will no longer say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ It will never enter their minds or be remembered; it will not be missed, nor will another one be made.” Jeremiah is foreseeing the time when God’s redemptive purposes will open up to include all nations. The ark will no longer be referenced, because it was a symbol of the “particular” phase in redemptive history, when God was reaching out to the whole world through one single nation. In the “universal” phase, God reaches out directly to all nations. (There’s a symbol of this in the book of Revelation when an angel declares, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah,” and then “God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant.” The true ark is now in heaven, and it speaks of God’s redemption extending to all nations.)

So even if Jeremiah could have had some role in preventing the Babylonians from destroying the ark (which is unlikely, since Jeremiah was kept under guard by the Judeans until the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and set him free), he probably wouldn’t have tried to do so. That would have been working against his own prophecy!