Guest
Stephen K. Ray was raised in a devout and loving Baptist family. His father was a deacon and Bible teacher, and Stephen was very involved in the Baptist Church as a teacher of Biblical studies. After an in-depth study of the writings of the Church Fathers, both Steve and his wife Janet converted to the Catholic Church. He is the host of the popular, award-winning film series on salvation history, The Footprints of God. Steve is also the author of the best-selling book Crossing the Tiber, and most recently, Genesis: A Bible Study Guide and Commentary.
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Transcript
Eric Sammons:
The Book of Genesis proposes answers to some of life’s most important and most controversial questions, but often readers misunderstand or miss those answers. A new book will help us properly interpret this most important biblical text. Hello, I’m Eric Sammons your host and editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage you to hit that like button and to subscribe to the channel. Also follow us Crisis Magazine, @CrisisMag at all the various social media channels.
Okay, so we have a great guest today. It’s Steve Ray. I probably don’t need to introduce him to most of our audience, but I’m going to anyway. So Steve Ray was raised in a devout and loving Baptist family. His father was a deacon and Bible teacher, and Steven was very involved in the Baptist Church as a teacher of biblical studies. After an in-depth study of the writings of the church fathers, both Steve and his wife Janet, converted to the Catholic Church. He’s the host of the popular award-winning film series on Salvation History, the Footprints of God, highly recommended, by the way. Steve is also the author of the bestselling books Crossing the Tiber and most recently, which I have right here in my hands, Genesis: A Bible Study Guide and Commentary. Welcome to the program, Steve.
Steve Ray:
Thank you Eric. I’ve admired your work from afar and enjoy Crisis Magazine every morning when it comes into my inbox, and it’s a great honor to be with you today.
Eric Sammons:
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And I’ll just give a quick plug to subscribe to Crisis Magazine. Go to our website, it’ll ask you to subscribe and you’ll get that email that is so valuable each morning with at least a couple articles to help you through the day.
Okay, so this book is from Ignatius Press, Genesis: A Bible Study Guide and Commentary. And I have to ask, the first question is, it’s just simply why’d you decide to write a book on Genesis? There’s lots of biblical commentaries out there on Genesis as well. Why did you think we needed another one?
Steve Ray:
Really in doing the work on this and writing it, there really aren’t that many on Genesis. There are some sets like Anchor Bible series and a few others, and I know that the Catholic commentaries on sacred scripture has done a New Testament and they’re starting an Old Testament series now. But really, from a Catholic perspective especially, there are Protestant books, but from a Catholic perspective, there’s really not much out there, especially dealing with things like typology and the sacraments. And one of the things that I do in my book is I really give a lot of honor to Jewish rabbis and commentators back from even before the time of Christ all the way up through modern Jewish scholars. So I figured…
It started actually when somebody asked me to write a Bible study on Genesis for them, and it was a simple study, it wasn’t… This is developed from it, but it was just weekly studies going through it. But as I did it, I said, “This is a powerful book. This Book of Genesis is loaded with material.” And it’s intimidating to a lot of people. A lot of people look at that book, it’s the second-longest book in the Bible, 50 chapters. People look at the Old Testament and they just, “Ah, maybe next year I’ll read it.” And they set it aside. So I thought what I would do is turn that simple Bible study I’d written into a book that’s very approachable, almost reads like a novel I’ve been told, and make the book more approachable so that people can jump in and enjoy the Book of Genesis and reap all the benefits of its purpose and meaning.
Eric Sammons:
I think one of the… I’ve been harping a lot on this podcast about the importance of Catholics reading the Bible. And it’s very intimidating though, particularly because if you pick up a lot of books about Genesis, more scholarly books particularly, the first thing you find is they’re going to trash everything that’s traditionally held about the Book of Genesis. It wasn’t written by Moses, it was written way, way after the events that it describes, probably after the exile and everything. There was this JEDP, for people who don’t know what that is, you don’t have to worry about it, but the idea that there’s these various authors and it was compiled later. Undermining basically the historicity of the entire book really, but particularly the earlier chapters. And so what is your approach here when you look at, would you say it’s more traditional? Is it more taking some historical, critical, all of the above? How did you approach it?
Steve Ray:
The other thing that is used against Genesis is we have science now, so why do we need these old fairytales? I address both of those, not in a huge scholarly way, but in a way that people can understand. I always have said even in Catholic theology that if I’m going to err on the side of the church fathers or modern scholars, I’m going to err on the side of the church fathers who there’s always the saying that the closer you are to the spring, the cooler and fresher the water is, and the closer you get back. So when I look back at the Jewish sages, the writers of the Old Testament, whether it’s the prophets or so on, Jesus, the apostles, they all refer to these are the books of Moses. Moses wrote these books. They’re the books, the law of Moses. And the amount of transfiguration. Who do you have? Moses and Elijah. Why? Because Moses represents the law and Elijah represents the prophets. That’s the whole of the Old Testament.
So I take the position and I’ll explain the JEPD, which is just so people will know, it’s called the documentary hypothesis, where only scholars of the last a hundred years who think they sometimes know more than the other guys do. C. S. Lewis calls it generational snobbery. Somehow authors wrote it in the fifth or fourth or fifth century B.C. and then they compiled it into the story. But the writers of the Old Testament assumed that those books were written by Moses. King David and the others assume they’re Moses. You get to Jesus and the apostles, it’s always Moses. Paul. The fathers of the church, the doctors of the church, the martyrs, they all say it was Moses that wrote those books.
So I conclude that the books are mosaic, that they came from ancient times. And there’s even a quote here in the book of Deuteronomy itself, “And when Moses wrote this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, when Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book, he wrote,” even the Book of Deuteronomy claims that this whole thing was written by Moses. Now of course, the Abraham, he was… Moses wasn’t alive back then, but those traditions would’ve carried along. And then Moses compiled them all into the five books of the Pentateuch which means the Five Scrolls, of which the first is Genesis.
And so Moses is the author. It may have been redacted. Obviously, or it would seem obvious at the end of Deuteronomy when we hear about Moses’ death, that somebody else added that little addendum on there about his death. But my conclusion through the whole thing, I’ll conclude along with Jesus and the apostles and others, that it is a mosaic authorship. It may have been redacted and changed, but in the end, we are assured by the church that has the authority to make this claim that we are reading the inspired word of God and it’s all one work, not divided up into a bunch of sections.
Eric Sammons:
And why do you think it matters whether or not Moses basically was the primary author of Genesis and the whole Pentateuch or not? Because what you’ll often hear is arguments, “Oh, it doesn’t matter if it’s Moses or if it’s JEDP or whoever it was, because now we have the Bible.” But it does seem that because there’s such a consensus about being Moses that there has to be some reason why it would matter whether or not it was Moses or some later anonymous compilers.
Steve Ray:
Because it would seem to me to be dishonest otherwise. If all the way through it says Moses, Moses, Moses, and we find out that Moses didn’t write it, it’s like if somebody else wrote a letter to you and said, “This is Steve Ray writing this letter,” but they’re really lying, it’s somebody else. It’s basic dishonesty. I believe that the word of God is the word of God and it can be trusted. And if it says that Moses wrote these books, then I’m going to tend to believe that Moses wrote those books. Because if I can disprove things that are verifiable in the Bible, then why do I trust the Bible where it says things that are non-verifiable like that there’s a heaven or my sins are forgiven? If it says that Moses wrote it and it didn’t, he didn’t, then why should I believe anything else it says? So I think it’s basic integrity and accepting the facts of the text and what it says and what all of those…
One of the reasons, Eric, that I use a lot of Jewish authors in here, because it was their book long before it was ours. We Christians didn’t come along until 2000 years ago, but the Jews have been reading this book for 1,500 years before us and they have a very strong opinion that these are written by Moses and we came along as Christians and we held the same thing. Like I said in the beginning, if I’m going to err on the side of those ancients all the way up to a hundred years ago or scholars today that think they’re more smart because they have computers, I think I’m going to err on the side of the ancients.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, so now the Book of Genesis, as you said, it’s a long book, it’s 50 chapters, it has lots of stories in it. It is funny when you read Genesis and you… If you haven’t read in a long time, you reread it. Sometimes you’re a little bit shocked by some of the stories in it and you’re like, “Whoa, this would definitely not be a PG movie, that’s for sure.”
Steve Ray:
No, it’s a very earthy book.
Eric Sammons:
It’s a very earthy book, but I do think the first thing we have to address is the first three chapters, which is what is most controversial about the book, it’s the pre-history, so to speak. We’re talking about the creation of the world, we’re talking about Adam and Eve, the fall. And so I think everybody who’s probably interested in this book thinking is how do you approach that, particularly in light of the modern concerns about the creation of the world, evolution, young Earth, creationism, old Earth creation, big bang, all that stuff? How do you tie all that into what Genesis is telling us?
Steve Ray:
You’re absolutely correct. Genesis is a book that can throw people off. Can I just say how I divide it up real quickly and then I’ll jump do into that question? In order to see Genesis in a simple way and not overwhelming, this is 50 chapters, is I’ve divided it up into two sections and each section has four sections. Very simple. You have pre-history or that’s primordial history. That’s up through the first 11 chapters. Things that we really don’t have a date for, like the flood or something or creation. So those four are Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, that’s the first 11 chapters. If you remember those four, you’ve got the first 11 chapters of Genesis… Put it in your shirt pocket there.
Then the second half we could call patriarchal history or history that you can start assigning dates to, archeology, other civilizations and culture. So you can start beginning… It’s around 2000 B.C.. And that section is Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. And you remember those four, and you can stick the second half of Genesis in your shirt pocket and carry it around. It makes it very simple.
Now, the whole thing about creation is the Catholic Church has never said that anyone has to believe in a six-day creation or seven day creation, or whether it’s an evolutionary process or I like what Augustine said, that God just went boom and just did it and it was all there at once. That he had the power to do that. He didn’t need seven days to do it and he didn’t need evolutionary process, he could have just done it with he said it and boom, there it was all created in one move.
What the church does teach is that we have to believe that God created the universe from nothing, ex nihilo, the Latin ex nihilo, which means out of nothing. In other words, matter was not eternal and there wasn’t a whole bunch of stuff there that God decided to take and form into this universe that we know today. There was nothing. And in the beginning, God created something out of nothing and that’s what we are incumbent upon us, required that we believe. Second of all, that life began with God, whether it’s animal life or tree life or any other kind of life.
And thirdly, and there’s minute variations to this too, but and thirdly that the human being has a soul which was immediately created by God at the moment of conception. That at some point in time, whether it was a six-day creation and he created Adam and breathed in him and he became a living soul or whether there was an evolutionary process and a certain point in time, God said, “I’m going to place a soul in this person and this person.” What we have to believe is that every human being has a body and a soul composite the two together and the soul is given immediately by God at the moment of conception. Those are the three elements.
When science came along and the whole evolutionary ideas came along, it didn’t throw the Book of Genesis into the trash heap of history. What it just said is God has written two books. He’s written the natural world, which is obviously his. So if you want to understand Bach or Mozart or Raphael, you go look at their work and you’ll understand a lot about them by looking at their work. So you can look at God’s creation. In fact, in Romans, Paul says that we can see a lot about his power and his divine nature by that which has been made. One Greek word poema. By his poem, God is a poet, and the word poema means the work of art. The artist made a work of art and Paul says “You can learn a lot about him by looking at that poema that he made.”
So we look at nature, there are dinosaur bones, there are indications that the Earth is older than 6,000 years. So then we as Christians say there’s another book also that God has written the divine revelation called scripture, and we have these two works of God and how do they work together? They can’t contradict each other because God made both of them. So we have to figure out how they work together. So some people say, the young Earth people, that God created in seven literal days and he made it look like it was older. I tend not to agree with that because that makes God a little deceitful. Let’s put dinosaurs there to trick these folks. Or you can have the understanding that God used an evolutionary process. Neither one takes away from God’s power and omnipotence or the fact that mankind is unique with a soul infused by God.
So the Catholic Church says that we are free to hold to either of these views or Augustine’s view that bam, it just happened. But what we do have to believe is that God created it out of nothing, that life began by God and that the soul is a unique creation of God at the moment of conception. One of the things that I like about Genesis is that begs a question. It says in the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, which then begs the question, what was before the beginning? If at the beginning matter started, it began, what was before the beginning? And there we see an artist. God existed from before the beginning.
And even in the catechism it says this, but I like to embellish it a little, that God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit enjoyed each other so much in eternity before they created. They had so much fun, they were laughing together and were made in his image and we laughed. So they must have a great time. They loved each other and it just bubbled over. They said, “This is so much fun what we have. We should create creatures in our image to share this all with us,” and that’s why God created us. He didn’t create us to beat us down and make us go to hell because we don’t want to follow all these million rules. He created us because he wanted to share all of this joy and love that the Trinity was experiencing and that’s why he created us. That’s what was before the beginning and that’s why there was a beginning. So God could share all of this with us.
Eric Sammons:
That’s great. It’s great to have that perspective on it. One of the things that frustrates me a little bit with the whole creation, evolution, science debate, not that I don’t think it’s important, it is, but that I feel like when a Catholic or any Christian reads now the first three chapters of Genesis in particular, they only read it in the context of that debate. Like “What does it say this or does it say that about? Is that against evolution? Oh, that actually supports evolution,” whatever the case may be. And to me, the Bible says has a lot of meanings, live purposes of it, but there is that purpose of us reading it, what can it say to me in my life? What would you say, just the average Catholic reading the first three chapters of Genesis, and the rest of Genesis, what should they be looking for to tell them in their life to be a better follower of Jesus Christ?
Steve Ray:
With that in mind, I did not get stuck in the weeds in my book of all the debate between creationism and evolution, all that. I summarized it with some very good ancient and modern scholars, but I kept it simple. I didn’t want to get stuck in the weeds and have it pull me under the water and everybody. Because if I start my book like that, everybody’s going to go, “Oh, here’s another one of those academic books,” and they just set it aside. What I tell the story of is that this is the most important book of the Bible in my estimation because I can smell, taste, see, hear and touch, and everything we know about the world around us comes from those five portals, so to speak, into our brain. Microscopes and telescopes only accentuate those senses. They don’t add to them.
We can’t know how we got here. We can’t know what was before the beginning because we don’t have the spiritual, historical, technology in our brains to know that, but God can reveal it to us and therefore where do we come from? Why are we here? Is there purpose or meaning to life? Why is there suffering? What came about that brought suffering into? Where are we going? Is there a destiny that we’re heading towards? None of those things science can tell us. Science may tell us the how of certain things, but it can’t tell us the why. The Bible tells us the why because God says, “I want these people to know me. I created them for a relationship. I want them to enjoy the hummingbird whose wings flap 70 beats a second. I want them to enjoy this as much as I do, and I want them to love me and know me and why I made them, so I’m going to reveal it to them.”
That’s what the Book of Genesis is. It’s not a theology book and it’s not a book debating whether it was creation or evolution. It’s a book that explains to us who we are. An artist is telling us why he made us and what our purpose is and your suffering, let me tell you why you’re suffering. Genesis chapter 3 is the explanation of suffering “Because your forefathers, Adam and Eve, they did something which spoiled the beautiful creation I made,” and like C. S. Lewis says that when they did that, the Earth became bent. It was no longer straight like it was. It was now bent and there has to be a remedy for that bent-ness to get it back again. And God set about doing that.
And even in Genesis chapter 3, before they ever get kicked out of that garden, he says, “I’ll bring enmity between you and the woman,” he says to Satan and he explains what that remedy’s going to be. So even in the Book of Genesis, not only does he tell us why suffering and agony and problems and disjointed relationships, all these things came into the world, but he says right after that, “And I got a plan to fix it.” God could have said, “You sinned. I’m just going to let you rot. I’m going to let the sin take its consequences and let you rot.” Or “I’m so ticked off with you,” this is probably what I’d have done if I was God, “I am so ticked off with you. I’m just going to wipe you off the face of the Earth, and maybe later I’ll start over again with something else.”
But he didn’t, he didn’t accept those, that dilemma. He took a third alternative. He says, “I really like what I made. It is very, very good,” he said on the last day of creation. “So I’m going to redeem it. I’m actually going to take what was bent and I’m going to use the very people who brought that sin into the world and have them be part of the redemption where I bring it back to its glorified state again. In fact, I’m going to send my son down to become one of them.” And so the whole Book of Genesis, those first three chapters are glorious because they tell us who we are, how we got here, who God is, why he made us and all of this. And it’s a revelation that we could never discover with a microscope.
Eric Sammons:
I think I heard somebody once say that Genesis tells us what the problem is and the rest of the Bible then tells us what the solution is because… Especially Genesis chapter 3. Now one of the things that in order to understand the Book of Genesis, and this is particularly… I know Protestants also have this on some level, but I feel like Catholics really, we get this part, we understand the importance of that, and that’s typology. And you really can’t understand the Book of Genesis and really the whole Testament fully without typology. And I want to ask you about that, but I want to tie that in a little bit to what you were saying, how you’ve been very dependent upon Jewish rabbis for some of your interpretation, but obviously that seems to be an area where there’s going to be some difference in that the typology that we see as Catholics points to Jesus Christ and his church, obviously Jewish rabbis don’t see that. How do you bring that all together of our beliefs in typology, but also the Jewish understanding into a coherent understanding of Genesis?
Steve Ray:
Even the Jewish writers and rabbis know that the Old Testament or what they would call the law and the prophets, because obviously they don’t have a New Testament, so they wouldn’t call it the Old Testament, like Jesus, for him it was the law and the prophets. And so they knew that the law and the prophets were pointing forward to something. They were waiting for the Messiah, they missed him, but I hope they catch him the second time around. It’s like a man at a bus stop and he’s got a suitcase and he’s waiting for the train, this is what I tell people when I take them to Israel. And he falls asleep, the train comes and leaves and the janitor wakes him up an hour later, says, “Sir, what are you doing?” He said, “I’m waiting for the train.” “I’m sorry, the train already left, left.” “No, it didn’t. No, it didn’t. I’ve been sitting here the whole time. The train hasn’t come yet.” But maybe they’ll catch them around the next time, the second coming.
They knew something was coming. They prophesied about it. They knew Isaiah was pointing towards a Messiah coming. But for us as Christians, we see the same thing the Jews did, but now we have the benefit of looking back through the lens of Christ. He’s like the telescope or the binoculars. So we now have water baptism. How we get born again? By water and spirit. Take the binoculars, look through the lens of Christ, and we see baptism there in the ark, going through the waters and the white dove above it, water and spirit. Or Moses taking the people through the Red Sea with a pillar of cloud, the Holy Spirit above them, water and spirit, and they come out into the new land where they can now have the miraculous bread. These are all pictures of the future reality that we’re going to see in Christ.
So the way I view this, Eric, is Jesus is in the middle between the Testaments and he’s the conductor and the Old Testament has all the basic themes. So he points his one to the Old Testament and they play the basic theme and then he swings over and then the woodwinds and the French horns and the flutes, they develop that theme in the New Testament, the fullness of the sacraments in Christ. And he keeps going back and forth and you can see the development of what’s in the old as it comes to fruit in this beautiful orchestra of the new.
One of the reasons I became Catholic is because of the whole idea of typology. I learned more about Mary from the Old Testament than I did from the New Testament. I was convinced of the Marian Dogmas because of the Old Testament. And then when I read the new, it’s like it popped from black and white into widescreen technicolor. That’s what typology does, and Genesis is loaded with it, and I bring those… I elicit, I bring those all out for people to see.
Eric Sammons:
One analogy I’ve heard with the typology, it’s almost like if you watch a famous sporting event years later, it’s already occurred, you know exactly what the final result is. You know who wins. So you’re watching a baseball game, say a World series from years ago. When you watch it later, you see all these events like, “Oh, that happened in the second inning, I know what that’s going to lead to. That’s going to end up being this. I know how…” Whereas when you watch it live, you have no idea the full meaning. It’s the same thing with the typology of the Old Testament. If you read it without knowledge of the New Testament, you can get a lot out of it. It’s exciting. There’s a lot to learn from it, but you don’t yet see the rest of the story, and it’s not filled out. You don’t really understand the implications of everything.
Steve Ray:
Joseph is a picture of the life of Christ. If you read the story of Joseph thinking of Jesus, Joseph’s life is the life of Jesus in typology and his life makes more sense when you read it in the light of Christ. Another thing I just, in the same vein as the typology we’re talking about is, it also you can see the Trinity revealed in the Book of Genesis over and over again. I don’t think the writer, and I put this in my book, I don’t think the writer understood when he was writing about the Trinity because we have the fullness of revelation now, like you say, we’re watching the baseball game looking back, but there’s things in the revelation of God, like “Let us make man in our image.”
Now, the Jews and I comment on this here, the Jews, some of how they try to wrestle with that, maybe that means he’s referring to the angels, but angels are never ever referred to as involved in the creation. In fact, they were part of the creation. Or maybe it’s the divine plural, like a king says, “We do this,” but there’s no indication of God ever speaking like that either. The best clue there is that the name Elohim, the name for God is singular, but Yahweh, the whole idea of us is plural.
So you’ve got God saying, “Let us make man in our image.” And then it carries on too because you get to the… When Abraham is in his tent and the three strangers come and there are three of them, and yet he welcomes them in the singular, Lord. In the singular, yet there are three. And when they finally split, it says that then one of them left and two of them went down to Sodom, of those three. And when the brimstone came down, it says, “And Yahweh on Earth called down fire from Yahweh in heaven.” And the fathers of the church said, “Here we see the Trinity.” And even when it says that those three come there, I go into great detail on this because I love this kind of stuff in the Book of Genesis, and both Ambrose and Augustine says, “We’re treading on very deep waters here and seeing the mystery of the Trinity.”
So I like to say to people jokingly, when is the only place in the Bible we see God walking on Earth with all six feet? Genesis 18.
Eric Sammons:
And it is amazing because it’s understandable why the author himself, Moses, and the first readers of it, they would of course have no idea of a Trinity because it had not been fully revealed to them. But once it’s revealed to us through our Lord and the Holy Spirit, then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, now I’m starting to understand this a lot deeper than I did.”
Steve Ray:
Right, exactly.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, if I’m going to interview somebody about the Book of Genesis, I have to ask him about the person I think is the most mysterious figure in all the sacred scriptures and that’s Melchizedek.
He shows up and then all of a sudden it’s like he’s this minor character that almost seems meaningless. If you’re just coming in fresh, you’ve never read the Bible, you read Genesis, you probably at the end of… If you took a quiz later, you might not even remember there was a Melchizedek in the Bible. Yet they start bringing him up over and over again later in the Bible. Who the heck is Melchizedek?
Steve Ray:
He is a very mysterious figure, and of all of them… He is so important. There’s four verses. I think it’s four, maybe five, but I think it’s only four verses in Genesis 14. And Abraham is coming after a battle, he passes through the Kings Valley. And in the movie that I made on Abraham, and we did it all on location, even in Iraq. By the way, all these places that I’m mentioning in the Book of Genesis, I’ve been there, we’ve been there and made documentaries and explored these areas and there’s what’s called the King’s Valley, which is right now it’s the part of the valleys that surround the city of Jerusalem. And when he came by, he said that this man came out of the city of Jerusalem named Melchizedek, and he was the king of Salem, Jerusalem. And he is the priest of the most high God.
In that passage four times it says most high God, and I think it’s only five times mentioned in the whole Bible, four of them are right there packed into that little passage. So he is a priest of the most high God, and the church has always understood him to be an image or a type of Christ, maybe even Christ in a pre-incarnate form. And what does he bring out? Bread and wine. Abraham, who represents the people of God, gives him a 10th of the spoils. He gives him a tithe, which means Abraham represents all of us because all of us come from his loins. So Abraham, representing all of us, brings 10% and gives it to this priest who is bringing out bread and wine, which represents the Eucharist and it represents Jesus Christ. And Jerusalem is a very eucharistic city all the way from back in Abraham’s time, almost 2000 B.C., and bringing out bread and wine, which is a picture.
But then when we get to the New Testament, we know that Jesus comes from the tribe of David, which is the kingly tribe. The kings come from, the priests come from Levi, the tribe of Levi. Jesus doesn’t. I think that Mary, he does through Mary, but we’re never told it because Mary is a little side point, but Mary is a relative of Elizabeth who is 100% Aaronic Priesthood. So I think that Mary had priestly blood, so Jesus probably had both, from Joseph and from Mary.
Anyway, so this whole thing of Melchizedek then is in the New Testament, how do you justify Jesus being the priest? Because we know that he’s prophet, priest and king. From a king you come from Judah, from priest you come from Levi, but he doesn’t come from Levi from his father, he comes from Judah. Because then the book of Hebrews said, “He’s not from the tribe of Levi. He goes back much farther. He’s all the way from the tribe… He’s from the line of Melchizedek, which has neither beginning nor end.”
And I’m on a pilgrimage, and I’m doing the whole story of Salvation History from Adam and Eve till today in the 30 minutes looking out over Jerusalem. And I said “See that valley,” I say to the priesthood, “See that valley? That’s the King’s Valley. You guys, your priesthood is 4,000 years old because you come from right down there. You are in the line of Melchizedek through Jesus Christ.”
So he is a mysterious figure, but fascinating, and I really cover that well in the book.
Eric Sammons:
One of the things I noticed when you read the book of Hebrews and talking about the order of Melchizedek without any beginning or end things like that is it seems like there was some understanding, speculation among Jews of who Melchizedek was. Now, in your own reading of the Jewish rabbis, do they see him also as a messianic figure or is there something else they see him as?
Steve Ray:
They see him as a messianic figure, and some even modern scholars think of him as being Seth, the son. Noah’s son, Seth, the righteous one. But I don’t know that that’s the case. I don’t speculate about that. I bring that up in the book, that idea, but I just think that he is a messianic figure. God is always giving us indications. He’s furthering the revelation. He’s building the foundation so that when the Messiah comes, we’ll go back and say, “Of course, he’s the new Adam. Of course, he’s Melchizedek. Of course, he’s the new David. Of course, he…” Jesus fills the Old Testament. The Old Testament is full. Even when Jacob is wrestling with the man, it says, “A man came and wrestled with him all night at the Jabbok River,” and I take my groups there, I’m going to be there in February, we’re going to be back at the Jabbok River. And I always wrestle the priest while we’re there. And says, “You decide who’s Jacob and who’s the angel.”
At that point, Jacob realizes that he’s just been wrestling with God. He says he named the place Penuel. “I’ve met God face to face and I haven’t died.” And so all the way along you see God revealing himself. It’s sometimes called the angel of the Lord, but it’s him. For example, the burning bush, is that an angel or was it God? It says “God is in that bush,” but he refers to himself as the messenger angel. So Genesis is full of this.
Eric Sammons:
Now, when we’re reading Genesis, and as Catholics, because you have experience as a Bible teacher in the Protestant world, and I know you use in your own study here, you use some Protestant commentaries and scholars, but how is it distinct? How is our reading of Genesis as Catholics distinct from how Protestants might approach it?
Steve Ray:
There’s a lot of similarities of course, but I think a couple of them stand out to me. First of all, as a Protestant, I read the Bible with my own interpretation. I don’t have the blessing or the protection of the tradition of the church and the official teaching of the church. So when I’m reading it… Protestant Bible study basic, if you remember back in those days, you’d sit around a circle and you’d say, “What does this mean to you?” My attitude has become I don’t give a rip what it means to you. What did it mean to the author who wrote it, and how has the Jewish people and the church understood this from the beginning? What did they think it means? Who am I as an American who speaks English that lives in a democracy, so to speak, and who… Tongue in cheek there. And who is 2000 years removed and knows nothing of the context of Genesis? How am I supposed to read Genesis and think that I can interpret it for myself?
I have the blessing of having the Jewish people and the magisterium of the church and the fathers of the church. So when I read this book… And also I have the blessing of having been to those places, know how those people still live. You’ve got to live with the Bedouins for a while, which I’ve done, and you’re walking with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, these Bedouins. There’s no reason to believe Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had all their teeth. You go out with a Bedouin today, they got a couple teeth and that’s it. We see these movies of biblical characters, they all had the strayed, beautiful, white, pearly. This is not the land of the Bible, believe me. And so no dentists and toothbrushes back then.
As Protestants, we would’ve just said, “What does this mean to you?” And we would try to personalize it. But as Catholics, I think we have the great beauty of typology and of analogy and the teaching of the church and the instruction of fathers and all of that, which we can incorporate. I just love being a Catholic for that reason. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day when I get up and read the Bible, I can immerse myself in the tradition and beauty of the church.
Eric Sammons:
Basically it’s the guardrails on the road. You’re driving up down a mountain or something like that and you have the guardrails. Sure, you could go off and you’re probably just going to fall down, but the church’s traditions and the magisterium keep it from that happening. You can stay on the path and really understand it more.
Steve Ray:
Exactly. That’s a good analogy.
Eric Sammons:
So I have to ask you, like we were talking about before, lots of stories in Genesis. It’s a very earthy book as you mentioned. It definitely it’s worthwhile to read, but what would you say, of all the stories, what would you say is your favorite story in the Book of Genesis?
Steve Ray:
I’d have to say it’s the pinnacle of the book and the cover of the book, is the story of Abraham offering the Akedah. We call it the sacrifice of Isaac, but he didn’t sacrifice Isaac. He offered to sacrifice Isaac and the Jews call it the Akedah, the offering. It’s the pinnacle of the Book of Genesis in my mind. When you read… Up to that point, and then it just carries on, but that is… You’ve reached the mountaintop when you get to Genesis 22. And one of the reasons is because of typology again. Give me a couple minutes to develop this.
It’s just fascinating because God says “Now he’s got this son,” Abraham has this son, “A son of promise, and it took him 25 years of wandering in this land before he got the son, and now it must be another 15 years.” My guess is that Isaac is maybe 15 years or old or so. “Strapping young man, Abraham’s constant companion, Abraham’s hope for the future and the promises of God fulfilled through this boy.” Then God comes and says, “Abraham, Abraham.” And he said, “Here I am.” And I’d make a point in the book that 23 times in the Bible, the response of the people of God is, “Here I am.” If God ever calls you, that’s the way you respond “Here I am, here I am Lord.” And he said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love, to Mount Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering.”
How can you even think about that? Especially if God told you that all the promises he’s made are going to come through that boy and now he wants you to… In the book I say there’s a lot of problems here. First of all, how could God demand human sacrificing? Why would Isaac allow himself to be sacrificed? He’s stronger than his old father now, there’s no way Abraham could sacrifice his son unless his son cooperated. And here then you begin to see… Oh, by the way, and I bring this out in the book too, from Jewish and Catholic scholars, is that in the Hebrew language, the language is softened where God is really saying, “Will you do this for me?” It’s not an overt command to offer your son. It is “I want you to do this, will you do it for me?” Which makes it all the more poignant because Abraham’s response then is, “Not only will I do what you command of me, I’ll also do what you request of me,” which is so much more poignant that way.
So now when you hear, “Take your son, your only son whom you love,” does that sound like a verse in the New Testament? Maybe “For God so loved the world, he gave his only-begotten son,” and there’s a reason there’s that tie in because Mount Moriah is where Solomon built his temple, the top of Jerusalem. Abraham lives in Beersheba, which is down by the Negev desert. It’s a three-day walk to get… “Why can’t I just offer him here, lord? Why do I have to walk three days and think about it the whole way? It’s going to drive me nuts thinking about killing my boy for three days. Why don’t I just do it here and get it…” “No, why don’t you go to Mount Moriah?”
Why? Because God knew that there was 2000 years later, another father with an only-begotten son was going to offer him on that same mountain. And when Isaac went up that mountain, he carried the wood of the cross on his back. And when Jesus, the other only-begotten son, also carried the wood on his back, and when Abraham found the ram with his horn stuck in a thicket, guess what Jesus’s head was stuck in? A thorn bush, crown of thorns when he was up on that mountain. The beauty of the parallels is unbelievable.
Abraham, I’m convinced, knew he did not have to offer his son because he said to the servants, “The Lad and I will go up and worship and we will come back down.” And Isaac said, “Father, we have the wood and the fire, but where is the sacrifice?” Abraham said, “The Lord will provide the sacrifice, my son.” Abraham knew that God would not actually make him kill his son. He was going to obey God, but he knew God was bigger than that. And the book of Hebrews says that even if he had, he knew that God would raise him from the dead.
So that to me is the pinnacle story. And this is also, this is the first time the word love is used in the Bible, of all… You’d think maybe Adam and Eve, right? Adam love… No, it’s not The first time. The word love is used is in that verse, “Take your son, your only son whom you love.” The word love is preserved by the Holy Spirit for this place where it’s a father who loves his only-begotten son to show the love of God the Father for his son Jesus in a human form. And then it gets even better if I got another minute.
Eric Sammons:
Go on. There’s so much here.
Steve Ray:
Okay, after Abraham takes the son to Mount Moriah and he offers him, and then in a way you can see Isaac has risen from the dead in a sense because he didn’t have to be killed. Abraham took him back home and he said, “My son needs a bride.” So Abraham sends his unnamed servant, we don’t know his name, 10 camels full of gifts to his own people back in Harran. And he finds Rebecca, she consents to go with him. He gives her all these spiritual gifts to whomever he wills. He brings Rebecca back and it says that Isaac is out walking in the fields and they see each other. Rebecca has a veil over her face and they fall in love. And it says, “Isaac loved her, married her, and took her into his tent.” Very romantic story. Women love this story if they read it carefully. It’s very romantic.
Now, just like Abraham found a bride for his son, God, the father takes his son back home after the sacrifice, and then he sends his unnamed servant, the Holy Spirit, who doesn’t have a name. We only know him as holy and spirit, a description. And he comes with spiritual gifts back to his own people in Jerusalem. And he looks for a bride for his son, and the church agrees to go and they go back and the son loves the bride and takes her into his tent and he weds her. The second time the word love is used as of Isaac loving Rebecca or a picture of the only-begotten son loving his bride. So the first time love is used as of a father for his only-begotten son. The second time love is used is for that son who falls in love with the bride, and it’s all a picture of God, the father and his son and the church.
Eric Sammons:
And it really sets up the entire Salvation History. The whole plan of salvation is the Father loves his son and the son loves the bride, the church, and we are that church. And so we’re the result of that. I think when you’re thinking of typology, there’s a lot of places in the Old Testament you can get examples and some are a little bit more clear than others. Some are a bit of a stretch, you’ll see, even… You’ll read the church fathers and sometimes you’ll be like, “That’s stretching a little bit.” But when it comes to the offering of Isaac, that one, it just has so much there that is clearly pointing to something in the future. And of course, even the author Hebrews brings out some of that. I never thought of it as the pinnacle though of Genesis. I like that, that it all builds to that and then flows from that.
Steve Ray:
And then it says at that point God says, “Now I know you fear me,” and I’m thinking, really? He hasn’t proven to you up until now, you had to do that, but at that point then it says “And Abraham was never tested again.”
Eric Sammons:
Wow. Yes. Good stuff.
Okay, so I think we’re going to wrap it up here, but I want a few things. First of all, the book is from Ignatius Press. There we go.
Steve Ray:
About 500 pages. It’s a good read.
Eric Sammons:
Yes, it is. Here’s the thing though, it somehow has that cross between a scholarly book and a popular book. What I mean by that is it clearly has scholarship behind it. When I’m reading, I’m like, okay, clearly you have looked at the scholarship, but I’ve read scholarly books and usually you fall asleep after a few minutes or you’re just constantly get footnotes, stuff like that. That’s not what this is. Any Catholic can read this and go through it. Obviously have your Book of Genesis next to you. You have quotes in there, but Book of Genesis next to your bible, next to you, but it’s readable by anybody. It’s from Ignatius Press. I’ll put a link in the show notes too so you can buy it. I always put a link directly from the publisher because that’s always the best way to buy these books instead of from Amazon or whatever.
Steve Ray:
If you get it from me, it helps our family and then you get a signed copy. And my granddaughter, Bella, is the one that sends it out and she makes a little money she’s saving towards going to Ave Maria University.
Eric Sammons:
Even better. And is that the Catholic Convert website?
Steve Ray:
Yep, Catholic Convert. Just go to products and it’s there. And if you buy it now, you also get my audio talk about Abraham that I did too. So you’ll get that for free as a bonus.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, that’s what I will link to then, because yes, usually some authors sell it themselves. Sometimes they just let publisher. But that’s the order. By the way, I’m just going to have my little rant here. Order when you buy a book, try to buy it first directly from the author. If they are not selling it, then buy it directly from the publisher if you can. And then if you’re just desperate and you got to get it, you can then go to Amazon or whatever, but that should be your last option.
Steve Ray:
Just real quickly say, one of the biggest compliments I got about the readability of the book that draws you in a way is the main editor at Ignatius Press been there I think 40 years. She told me, she said, “I had a real problem editing your book because she said I’d be reading along and 10 pages in, I’d forget that I was editing and I’d have to go back and start the chapter over again with my red pencil.” She said, “As soon as it is published,” she said, “I’m looking forward to curling up in front of the fire and reading the book without worrying about editing it.” That is a compliment from the main editor at Ignatius.
Eric Sammons:
That is a high compliment. As an editor myself, my wife’s an editor too, and sometimes you’ll be reading a book and it’s not so good, and I’ll start editing it in my head. And it’s like you know though when your job is to edit and you forget to edit, then it’s exact opposite. It’s a good book. So yes, I highly recommend it. It’s good. And I do think Genesis is the… I agree with you, it’s the most important book. Obviously we have the gospels and everything, but as far as establishing. To understand the Gospels, you have to understand the Old Testament in general, but you really, if you understand Genesis, you’re going to get a lot more out of the gospels themselves.
Steve Ray:
One of the things is what two books of the Bible begin with the words in the beginning? John’s book does, and I think that John. I have also the commentary on St. John’s Gospel I also published with Ignatius Press.
Eric Sammons:
That’s right.
Steve Ray:
And I make the point in that book that John starts with, in the beginning, because he’s saying, “If you want to understand my book, that be begins with, within the beginning, you’ve got to understand the first one that begins that way.” Because the book of John or the gospels need to have the Book of Genesis if you’re going to understand them completely.
Eric Sammons:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, so like I said, I will link to your website where you can purchase this and also check out all the million things you’ve been doing for so long. I don’t remember a time… What year did you become Catholic?
Steve Ray:
1994. 29 years ago. Seems like yesterday to me still, I’m a new convert in my mind.
Eric Sammons:
I got you by one year because 1993 is when I came to church, but I can’t almost not even remember a time as a Catholic when I didn’t have Steve Ray doing some great program or the footprints of God and all this great stuff. So really, I want to thank you for the great work you’ve done over the years and this is just-
Steve Ray:
I’m very humbled. Thank you.
Eric Sammons:
one example. You’ve helped a lot of people. I know you’ve helped me, but you’ve also helped… I know a lot of people you’ve helped, and I just want to thank you for that.
Steve Ray:
You’re welcome. Thank you. And I really enjoyed doing the show with you, and I’d be happy to come back anytime on a whole lot of other topics.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, that’d be great. That’d be great. Okay, I think we’ll wrap it up there then. Until next time, everybody, God love you.