Tribalism vs. covenantal kinship
A different world starts with a world of difference between the two
Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was, as it were, a pavement of sapphire, clear blue as the very heavens; but the Lord did not stretch out his hand against the leaders of Israel. They saw God; they ate and they drank. — Exodus 24:9-11 REB
Above: detail of photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash. Used by permission.
I.
In the fall of 1804 at the Bad River’s mouth in what is now South Dakota, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark find the Lakotas, perhaps the most formidable nation that the United States will break and bring under its fledgling empire. The next day, the American party sails four miles upriver to meet with the Sicangu Lakota chiefs. When Clark disembarks, according to historian Pekka Hämäläinen,
. . . he was swept into midair, twenty hands holding him on a white buffalo robe. From this elevated and enfeebling position . . . the explorer was offered a sumptuous display of Sicangu power and grandeur. Mostly he saw white. . . . he was “put down in the grand Council house on a White dressed robes” [sic]. Before long he was joined by Lewis, also carried in. . . . They faced two chiefs, and around them sat seventy warriors in a circle. As the captains processed the coded messages . . . an elder spoke softly, asking the newcomers to have pity on his people.1
Negotiations, ceremonies, and entertainment continue until midnight, all calculated to evoke “a relationship of peace and sharing with the Americans, a proposition that may have been sanctioned beforehand by the seventy Sicangu men present,” Hämäläinen surmises.2 When Lewis and Clark ask to retire, “. . . Black Buffalo [a chief] offered them women—an attempt to turn the obstinate newcomers into kin, to fit them in.” Lewis and Clark refuse the women.
The Lakotas wish to make the visiting Americans their brothers. So they invite them to participate in their egalitarian world:
The round of meetings [the following day] laid bare the Lakota political system, its inherent egalitarianism and emphasis on personal relationships. Sicangu leaders were forging all-important bonds between their bands and the Americans that would be the sinews of any relationship they might have in the future.3
The Lakotas forge kinship bonds with ceremonies, councils, and marriages, among other means. Trade marriages, Hämäläinen points out, “created kinship ties that bound individuals, families, and ultimately societies together through the social alchemy of intimacy and caring.”4 But the Americans will not by any means become the kin of the Lakota elder, the chiefs, or the seventy. The Americans don’t have ears to hear what Hämäläinen calls “the coded language of kinship.”5
Gifts also are part of the kinship code, and not just with the Lakotas. Earlier on Lewis and Clark’s journey, the Otoes chief Big Horse complains to the Americans that “I came here naked and must return home naked”—more kinship language. In essence, Big Horse asks “the Americans to act like kin and provide goods that sustained social relationships,” Hämäläinen says. But Lewis and Clark show “little patience for such quotidian concerns.”6 They are on a fast-paced mission to the Pacific.
Although all First Nations share what Professors Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez call a “kinship worldview,”7 the Lakotas’ version of it helps them adapt to new realities brought with the European invaders by shifting their home from the continent’s Eastern Woodlands to the Great Plains.8 The French invaders give the Lakotas’ greater council a new name—the Sioux. The Lakota oyátes (people) are part of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires, and they stop everything each year to reaffirm their kinship.9 Each spring the Seven Council Fires come together to smoke the calumet and reaffirm “their shared identity.”10 Each summer also the Lakota people move their camps and come together for weeks to renew their kinship covenant.11
The Sioux are “pragmatic and adaptable,” and their adaptability, Hämäläinen says, comes from “the alchemy of kinship”:
Sioux understanding of the universe and belonging was based on clear categories: the larger Sioux community consisted of ikčé wičháša, “ordinary people,” who formed one kindred community, takúkičhiyapi, beyond which all was danger. But these categories were also dynamic and contained the potential of inclusion. Although people outside the circle of kinship were strangers and enemies, kinship could be extended to them through wólakȟota, bonds of peace. The Sioux were allies, which was not a static condition but an active spiritual mandate to embrace others. That embrace can include anyone capable of proper behavior and thoughts. It is theoretically limitless.12
But the Americans, beginning with Lewis and Clark, do not understand kinship among peoples as “an active spiritual mandate to embrace others.” They do not understand life in covenant renewal. The Americans’ massacre of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee later that century is commonly commemorated as the last step in how the West was won.13
II.
The Bible’s new creation is political. Adam and Eve’s offspring are individuals, but in the new creation that follows the flood, Noah’s offspring are nations—seventy nations—all in covenant with God through Noah and his sons.
Adam and Eve’s progeny mate with gods, individual acts that mirror Adam and Eve’s own desire to “be as gods.”14 The earth is “corrupt and full of violence,” so God brings the flood and a new creation,15 completing what Walter Brueggemann calls the “main dynamic of creation/uncreation/new creation” in Genesis’s first eleven chapters.16 Genesis chapter 9 ends the flood narrative by focusing on a new covenant that, Brueggemann points out, “includes not only humankind but the whole creation.”17 Chapter 10 emphasizes a shift from individual guilt, which mandates the flood, to political blessing: the chapter’s extensive genealogy isn’t of individuals, as the genealogy in Genesis chapter 5 is, but of political entities:
The chapter is organized around Noah’s three sons. Thus, the world is viewed according to a familial symmetry already introduced in 9:18. . . . The basic principle of organization is not racial, ethnic, linguistic, or territorial, but political. It reflects networks of relations at a given time.18
The political life—the “network of relations”—suggested in chapter 10’s “Table of Nations” is God’s answer to the first creation dominated by a grasping, violent, individualized human race with no apparent sense of community or of place. Humanity’s new sense of community and place comes from the Table of Nations’ mix of genealogy, geography, and politics. The chapter’s communities are designated by genealogical terms, which are used figuratively. As Rabbi Umberto Cassuto points out, the genealogy’s “sons” are “peoples or tribes,” and sometimes they are also “unquestionably geographic terms.”19
The seventy names of nations don’t constitute a list of nation-states that we would define as “nations” today. Instead, the names suggest the flexible, political designations found in Revelation: “nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues.”20 The geographical terms—the location of each nation—suggest humanity's new sense of place and the means by which each nation will administer God’s covenant with that place and its greater biological community.
In Genesis’s new creation after the flood, human nature doesn’t change, but the promise—and the dangers—of humanity’s political calling are introduced. The seventy nations come as the fulfillment of a reprised command to be fruitful and multiply. In fact, Genesis understands the seventy nations “as a fulfillment of creation,” Brueggemann says. Like the rest of creation leaving Noah’s ark, the nations in chapter 10 are “being fruitful and multiplying,” he says, fulfilling God’s blessing on Noah and his sons.21 Cassuto suggests that Genesis’s characterization of the scattered nations as kin carries eschatological force:
This concept [of a new humanity, all related to Noah and his wife] serves as the foundation of the prophetic promise for the end of days that nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more—a promise that is quoted already by Isaiah and Micah as an ancient tradition in Israel.22
This new humanity shares the earlier humanity’s nature—its evil inclination,23 which now involves learning war—but its flexible, changeable network of relations points to a political solution later called the “kingdom of heaven” and the “kingdom of God.” God’s kingdom includes those from nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, all of whom live in kinship with one another.24 Genesis’s Table of Nations demonstrates, Cassuto says, that in “the new humanity . . . all peoples are brothers.”25
III.
But Genesis’s next chapter, the story of the city of Babel (Babylon) and its tower, presents an alternative unity. The Babylonians wish to unite the peoples not in a network of covenant relations but as a single race in an “attempt to forestall the divinely willed ‘scattering’ into a well-ordered world,” as Rabbi Everett Fox puts it.26 The Babylonians wish to control the future by making “a name for ourselves.”27 The new humanity demonstrates that it is capable of the same overreach as Adam and Eve’s progeny, but now they overreach together, crossing a political as well as a religious line.
In its only extensive digression, the Table of Nations foreshadows the Babel story and suggests Babel’s political origins through an account of Nimrod.28 The Table of Nations describes Nimrod as the king of Babel and of several other cities. Cassuto, concerned that Nimrod would move the list of nations from the “numerical symmetry” of seventy29 to seventy-one, makes this distinction:
. . . it appears that Nimrod has to be deducted from the total, since he is not mentioned as a nation but as an individual who ruled over many cities . . .30
Nimrod represents the first political corruption of kinship: an individual or a nation or tribe rules over other nations and tribes. Brueggemann finds a suggestion in the meaning of Nimrod’s name that “empire-building is regarded here as a rebellion against Yahweh’s intent of unity.”31
The end of the Babel story is the same as the result of God’s covenant with Noah in the Table of Nations—a scattering of peoples. But unlike the scattering in covenant, the scattering in the Babel story comes from an inability to hear one another. The Hebrew word shema’ is usually translated in Genesis 11:7 as “understand,” as in the Revised English Bible’s “they will not understand what they say to one another.” But Brueggemann finds significance in what shema’ really means—to hear, or to listen:
If the word is rendered “understand,” it may reflect only a verbal, semantic problem. But if translated as “listen,” the text may pose a covenantal, theological issue.32
Babylon’s builders are not covenant sisters and brothers. Their relationships are not egalitarian. They will no longer take counsel, and they will not hear one another.
Lewis and Clark have poor translators when they meet with the Lakotas,33 but their bigger communication issue is “covenantal, theological.” Like the Babylonians, perhaps, the Americans don’t have ears to hear the coded language of kinship.
IV.
Fox says that seven “represents the concept of totality and perfection in the Bible.”34 Seven and seventy, of course, appear at significant points in the Bible. For starters, God creates the earth in seven days, including the day God comes to make his resting-place on earth. God tells Moses to gather seventy of Israel’s elders, and God shares some of Moses’s spirit and authority with the seventy.35 After Babel, seventy nations scatter, and over centuries Israel is scattered with them. But God tells Jeremiah that he will return Israel from its exile—“from all the nations and all the places to which I have banished you”—in seventy years.36
V.
Shortly after Athens falls to Sparta, seventy democrats start the movement against Athens’s new oligarchic tribalism. But the democrats grow in number from their original seventy and win a critical battle against Critias and his Spartan supporters in 404 B.C., just eight months following Athens’s defeat in the Peloponnesian war. Within a few years, democracy returns to Athens.37
In his classic book The Open Society and its Enemies, physicist and political theorist Karl Popper summarizes democracy’s return to Athens and Plato’s reaction to it, found mostly in Plato’s dialogue The Republic.38 Popper’s Plato argues for a return to tribalism, which Popper defines as “the emphasis on the supreme importance of the tribe without which the individual is nothing at all.”39 A tribal state is inflexible, seeking to arrest all change by returning to an idyllic past:
[The ideal state] does not degenerate, because it does not change. The state which is free from the evil of change and corruption is the best, the perfect state. It is the state of the Golden Age which knew no change. It is the arrested state.40
Plato sees the dangers and the disorientation of his society as it moves from tribalism back to democracy. In seeking to return Athens again to tribal monism, Plato advocates measures that would be considered part of some totalitarian platforms today: the murder by doctors of political dissidents and the physically weak, the banishment of poets, the destruction of families, the worship of rulers as demigods, the free use of lies and deceit by rulers in furtherance of a greater truth unfathomable by those lied to (i.e., the lower classes), the guarantee of a pure ruling class through eugenics, the deliberate acclimation of children to war, and the denial of the individual’s existence outside of his or her relationship with the state.
Popper’s Plato has something in common with today’s reactionary, who Mark Lilla distinguishes from a conservative. Like Plato but not always like a conservative, a reactionary wants to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop!”41 The reactionary, Lilla believes,
blames modernity tout court, whose nature is to perpetually modernize itself. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why antimodern reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.42
One sees tribalism’s broad ideological spectrum in Paul Berman’s description of its left- and right-wing varieties:
There was always a people of God, whose peaceful and wholesome life had been undermined. They were the proletariat or the Russian masses (for the Bolsheviks and Stalinists); or the children of the Roman wolf (for Mussolini’s Fascists); or the Spanish Catholics and the Warriors of Christ the King (for Franco’s Phalange); or the Aryan race (for the Nazis).43
The animus between tribes suggested by these examples of tribal thinking explains why tribes sometimes go to war to destroy other tribes entirely. Despite its ideological variety, tribalism operates with no sense that “all peoples are brothers.”
In fact, no form of tribalism as described by Popper, Lilla, or Berman has anything to do with a kinship worldview. Individualism and tribalism may be mutually exclusive, but they sometimes lead to each other in Western civilization’s vicious cycles. By contrast, the kinship worldview of the Table of Nations honors both the individual and the collective by honoring the individual in the collective. Tyson Yunkaporta, who belongs to the Apalech clan, describes this balance:
. . . it is strangely liberating to realize your true status as a single node in a cooperative network. There is honor to be found in this role, and a certain dignified agency. You won’t be swallowed up by a hive mind or lose your individuality—you will retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected. In fact, sustainable systems cannot function without the full autonomy and unique expression of each independent part of the interdependent whole.44
Kinship’s respect for both the whole and for each member’s part in that whole creates a balance unknown in individualist and tribal societies. Kinship doesn’t foster dependence (tribalism), and it doesn’t foster independence (individualism) for its own sake. Kinship’s egalitarianism and relational consensus-building seek and maintain covenantal interdependence.
VI.
Israel is missing from the Table of Nations, its own expansive account of the origins of the world’s nations. Only after the story of Babel does Genesis find it necessary to move the seventy nations’ genealogy from an expansive scattering to a contraction—to the origins of Abraham, the first Hebrew. The genealogy’s turn from expansion immediately before Babel to contraction immediately after Babel suggests that Babel’s tribalism and empire-building calls for a second new creation through Abraham.
After Babel, Genesis’s genealogical contraction leads us back to Mesopotamia, the land of Babel but also the homeland of Abraham.45 Israel’s narrative begins with the story of Abraham’s travels as an empire’s exile. Abraham’s exilic calling becomes, in some way, the nations’ antidote to Babel and to empire: God tells Abraham that “in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”46 God’s covenant with Abraham and with his seed thereby culminates in what the book of Revelation refers to as the “healing of the nations.”47
By its own account, then, Israel is a latecomer to nationhood, born in exile and kin to the other nations only by God’s covenant faithfulness through barren Sarah. The Bible teaches, though, that Israel is a microcosm of those earlier nations. Moses begins his famous song in Deuteronomy by pointing out Israel’s metonymic relation to those nations. He sings that the number of the nations—seventy—pertains to the number of the children of Israel:
When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance / When He separated the sons of man / He set the boundaries of the peoples / According to the number of the sons of Israel.48
Moses’s mention of “the sons of Israel” refers to Exodus’s accounting that “All the persons who came from the loins of Jacob were seventy in number . . .”49 As Moses prophetically begins to sing of Israel’s descent from kinship—from its status as children of a nurturing God—to the destructive individualism and tribalism of its surrounding nations, he points here at the song’s outset to Israel’s true calling as a surrogate for the nations. In other words, Israel’s destiny through the Abrahamic covenant is to redeem the nations by returning them to God’s covenant and kinship worldview. As Jesus insists, Israel’s mission is to enliven and preserve the world’s other nations and peoples: “You are salt to the world.” Jesus makes this claim as part of his Sermon on the Mount, which theologian Richard Horsley calls Jesus’s “covenant renewal speech,”50 similar to Moses’s covenant renewal speech and song on the banks of the Jordan.
VII.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus teaches his disciples to forgive a repentant brother “even if he wrongs you seven times in a day.”51 Peter, perhaps unaware of Fox’s point that seven “represents the concept of totality and perfection,” seems to ask for clarification in Matthew’s gospel about the number of times each day he should forgive: “As many as seven times?”
Jesus seems to move Peter’s goalposts: “‘I do not say seven times but seventy times seven.”52
Peter’s question sounds like Daniel’s prayer: Daniel asks God to affirm Jeremiah’s prophecy that Israel’s exile would last for seventy more years. But Gabriel answers Daniel that it would be seven times that—“seventy weeks” of years:53
. . . seventy times seven years are marked out for your people and your holy city; then rebellion will be stopped, sin brought to an end, iniquity expiated, everlasting right ushered in, vision and prophecy ratified, and the Most Holy Place anointed.54
The similarity between the interactions in Matthew and in Daniel as well as these interactions’ similar conclusions—seventy times seven—would not be lost on Matthew’s first-century audience. As historian and theologian N.T. Wright points out, the timetable suggested by Gabriel’s “seventy times seven” leads directly to the Jewish revolt in Rome in the late 60s C.E.:
We know from Josephus that Daniel was a vital text for the mid-first century: that, he says, is what drove them to revolt. At that time a world ruler would emerge from Judaea! So how did they know it was to be at that time? Because of the chronological calculation that had been set in motion by the cryptic, coded message of the angel, in answer to Daniel’s fervent prayer: the exile will not last for seventy years, but for seventy times seven.55
But the Jewish zealots of Jesus’s day cannot hear Daniel’s “cryptic, coded” language of kinship.
The failure of these revolts, and ipso facto the apparent failure of Daniel’s “seventy times seven” prophecy, convince “most remaining Jews to give up the revolution and concentrate on privatized Torah-piety,” Wright says.56 Similarly, most Christians today read Jesus’s “seventy times seven” remark only as part of one’s privatized, aspirational practice in interpersonal relations.
Jesus’s use of Gabriel’s seventy-times-seven formulation, though, suggests that he associates forgiveness with the Messiah’s coming and the new creation that his victory on the cross institutes. The Messiah’s followers must forgive because they are called to live out Israel’s calling: as Wright puts it, “Forgiveness lay at the heart of the symbolic praxis which was to characterize [Jesus’s] redefined Israel.”57 Jesus calls his followers to take up his own vocation as Israel among the nations:
. . . having recommended to his followers a particular way of being Israel-for-the-sake-of-the-world, he made that way thematic for his own sense of vocation, his own belief about how the kingdom would come through his own work. He would turn the other cheek; he would go the second mile; he would take up the cross. He would be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. He would be Israel for the sake of the world.58
Peter and the rest of Jesus’s disciples—and Israel itself—must similarly forgive in order to be the salt of the earth, to listen to one another speaking and acting in the coded language of kinship, and to act in covenantal kinship with all peoples.
Jesus dies to turn Israel from its tribalism to its kinship calling. Just as in life Jesus associates himself with “sinners,” so also in death he associates himself with brigands—the zealots who want to accomplish Israel’s return from exile through inter-tribal violence. He pronounces judgment on Herod’s temple for becoming a den of brigands.59 Then he dies between two brigands.60 Finally, he rises from the dead to point Israel to the nations in a kind of return-from-exile-in-reverse: go “to all nations and make them my disciples. . .”61 Israel would help the nations end their own exile from covenant, land, and kin.
Gabriel presumably disappoints Daniel with his news that the Messiah won’t arrive in his generation. Jesus similarly disappoints Peter, who presumably wants a limit to the forgiveness he’s required to extend. But in the process of disappointing Peter, Jesus claims that the Messiah has come, kinship is restored, and a second new creation has begun, this time through Abraham’s seed.
The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
1 Hämäläinen, Lakota America, 134, quoting Clark’s journal.
2 Hämäläinen, 135.
3 Hämäläinen, 135.
4 Hämäläinen, 112-13.
5 Hämäläinen, 130.
6 Hämäläinen, 130.
7 Topa and Narvaez, Restoring the Kinship Worldview.
8 Hämäläinen, 2-3.
9 Hämäläinen, ix.
10 Hämäläinen, 125.
11 Hämäläinen, 173.
12 Hämäläinen, 83. Like the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, Lakotas seem to understand “kinship” as “a sphere of unconstrained relationally.” Strathern, Relations, 94. In a sense, too, Lakotas may be “kinnovators,” which Lizzie Skurnick defines as “one who forms an untraditional family.” Skurnick, That Should Be a Word, 8.
13 Warren, God's Red Son, 297. Dee Brown’s famous account of the First Nations’ struggle against the American encroachment of the West ends with Wounded Knee. Brown, Bury My Heart, 439-49.
14 Genesis 6:1-4; 3:5 KJV. Robert Alter notes the connection between Adam and Eve’s offense and that of their descendents: “As with the prospect that man and woman might eat from the tree of life, God sees this intermingling of human and Devine as the crossing of a necessary line of human limitation.” Alter, Hebrew Bible, Vol. 1, 25n1-4.
15 Genesis 6:11-13 REB.
16 Brueggemann, Genesis, 21-22.
17 Brueggemann, 83.
18 Brueggemann, 91-92.
19 Cassuto, Commentary on Genesis, Part 2, 181.
20 Revelation 7:9 KJV. See also Revelation 10:11; 11:9; 13:7; 17:15.
21 Brueggemann, 93-94.
22 Cassuto, 181, 188 (italics in the original).
23 Genesis 8:21.
24 Romans 15:7-13; Revelation 15:4; 21:24-26. Political scientist Daniel J. Elazar points out that the Hebrew Bible’s vision of the messianic era amounts to “a world confederation or League of Nations, each preserving its own integrity while accepting a common Divine covenant and constitutional order. This order will establish appropriate covenantal relationships for the entire world.” Elazar, “Althusius’ Grand Design,” xxxvi.
25 Cassuto, 181.
26 Fox, Five Books of Moses, 44.
27 Genesis 11:4 REB. Cassuto points out that the name is “for the future, for generations to come, on account of these splendid edifices.” Cassuto, 242-43.
28 Both Brueggemann and Cassuto believe that Nimrod anticipates the story of Babel as an alternative means to humanity’s unity and an alternative account of humankind’s scattering. Brueggemann, 92; Cassuto, 145-46.
29 Cassuto, 175.
30 Genesis 10:8-12; Cassuto, 177. Italics in the original.
31 Brueggemann, 92.
32 Brueggemann, 103.
33 Hämäläinen, 132.
34 Fox. Five Books of Moses, 44.
35 Numbers 11:16-16.
36 Jeremiah 29:10-14 REB.
37 Popper, Open Society, 182.
38 Allan Bloom argues that the title to Plato’s dialogue is a poor translation and prefers “the regime.” Bloom, Republic of Plato, 440n1.
39 Popper, 8.
40 Popper, 20.
41 Lilla, Shipwrecked Mind, xiii, quoting the first issue of the National Review.
42 Lilla, xiv.
43 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 48.
44 Yunkaporta, Sand Talk, 98. One thinks of Paul’s analogy of a body: “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you,’ or the head to the feet, ‘I do not need you.’ Quite the contrary: those parts of the body which seem to be more frail than others are indispensable . . .”—1 Corinthians 12:21-22 REB.
45 Babel is in Mesopotamia. Brueggemann, 92. As Walter Brueggemann points out, “For the sake of the promise, Abraham leaves the well-being of Mesopotamia.” Brueggemann, 127.
46 Genesis 22:18 NNAS.
47 Revelation 22:2 KJV.
48 Deuteronomy 32:8 NNAS.
49 Exodus 1:5 NNAS. See also Genesis 46:27 and Deuteronomy 10:22. See gen. Cassuto, 177.
50 Matthew 5:13 REB. N.T. Wright insists on the “historical context” of this beatitude and next one (“You are the light of the world”): “They sound a challenge to Israel: she is to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world. That always was her vocation: to be a nation of priests, to be YHWH’s servant, so that his glory might reach to the ends of the earth. But the salt has now forgotten its purpose.” Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 289. It’s worth remembering that Jesus’s own mission wasn’t to start a new religion but to begin the covenant renewal of Israel. Theologian Richard Horsely calls the Sermon on the Mount Jesus’s “covenant renewal speech.” Horsley, You Shall Not Bow, 44.
51 Luke 17:3-4 REB.
52 Matthew 18:21-22 REB.
53 Daniel 9:24 KJV.
54 Daniel 9:24 REB.
55 Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness (Pts. 1 & 2), 142 (italics in the original).
56 Wright, 115.
57 N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory, 432.
58 Wright, 564-65.
59 N. T. Wright offers this political understanding of Jesus’s famous “den of thieves” declaration: “The ‘house’ had become a den of lestai, brigands, and Jesus, like Jeremiah whom he quoted, was declaring divine judgment upon it.” Wright, 334 (Italics in the original).
60 Wright, “Jesus, Israel, and the Cross,” 32-33; Wright, Jesus Victory of God, 332.
61 Matthew 28:19-20 REB.
Lots to think about here, Bryce. I especially liked the discourse on 70 times 7 related to Daniel and messianic discourse.