Raymond: Hello. Thanks for joining us once again. My name is Ray McDonald and I’m with my wife Rosland, and together we work within the Christian community for Leket Israel, the National Food Bank. And with us once again, Peter Shir. Hey Peter, thanks a lot for joining us again.
Dr. Shir: Happy to do so.
Raymond: So Peter, tell us — 30-second snapshot. Tell us about yourself.
Dr. Shir: Sure. I’m an educator. I’m a scholar. That’s what I do — I study, I teach, I’m a professor. I have a website that I invite everybody to: pir.com. Come check it out. Watch my videos. Listen to what I have to offer. I write books because I’m passionate about education and connecting people and helping people to understand, sort of, where we live. I live on the edge, always between the Old Testament and New Testament. I live in that period between the testaments. That’s where most of my study comes in. And so I hope that’s something that’s helpful to people, because I’m able to offer them perhaps a perspective they never heard before, because I get to study all these different things.
Raymond: Wow. Excellent. I really find it humorous — sometimes I have a friend say, “Celtic Christianity. I’m getting right back to the source.” Or, “I’m a student of Martin Luther. I want to know right from the source.” You say, no, no, no, no. That is not the source. You’re gonna have to go back a little bit further.
Dr. Shir: Not old enough for me. So my expertise is really in the very, very early Christianity and very early Judaism. It’s really in the times when Christianity wasn’t Christianity yet and Judaism wasn’t quite the Judaism that we know yet. These are their early development stages. And this is where a lot of interaction happens actually between these ideas. This is where people find a lot of their shared foundation. One of my passions is to help Christians and Jews come together and see really the common ground that they have, because we actually have a lot of common ground and people don’t realize that. A lot of them just don’t have relationships. They don’t have connections. They don’t understand each other — and that’s true for both sides, by the way. But the work that you guys are doing in Leket Israel, I think it’s amazing that you’re promoting such an idea. A lot of people don’t realize that there are folks in Israel who don’t have food. “What are you talking about?” If you ask people — “Jews are rich, they have all the food they need. There’s no need that they have.” That is a wrong perception. That is not the reality. There are plenty of Jews who go hungry. There’s not enough, and that’s the work that you guys are doing that I think is fantastic.
Raymond: Wow. Thank you, Peter. Okay, so this is our third time together. For those of you who are watching this for the first time — stop, link below. You got to start at the beginning. We talked about clean and unclean, kosher, and then we talked a little bit about the New Testament. Has everything changed in the New Testament? We talked a little bit about that, and we also just want to go a little bit further. We look at Acts chapter 15. So Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles — to the goyim, to the nations — and he’s gone out, he’s traveling around the eastern Mediterranean area, and God is blessing his ministry. So he comes back to Jerusalem. He meets with the leaders of the church, the Jewish followers of Yeshua HaMashiach — Jesus as the Messiah. And so they’re having a conversation: what are we going to do with all these Gentiles that are now following Jesus? Would we say most of them were God-fearers?
Dr. Shir: The eastern Roman Empire — perhaps as much as a fifth of the Gentile world were considering themselves God-fearers.
Raymond: So unpack this for us. What’s going on? What’s the dispute? Now, you regard this as an oxymoron. Some of the sects of the Pharisees who believed — these are Pharisees who are followers of Jesus. That’s impossible, isn’t it?
Dr. Shir: Yeah, it sounds impossible to people. In people’s mind, you used to be a Pharisee — you can’t, if you believe in Jesus, continue being a Pharisee. But apparently you can. In the book of Acts, you can. And apparently in the book of Acts, you can be invited to this meeting of the apostles, and you can be a card-carrying Pharisee and a follower of Jesus. Is that possible? Apparently according to the Bible, it is. Maybe not in other people’s minds.
Raymond: So remember, Jesus said — to the effect — do as the Pharisees say, don’t do as they do. So their problem apparently was not their theology. There was a hypocrisy there.
Dr. Shir: Yeah, there were a few differences, but Jesus actually is quite positive on the Pharisees. If you notice, he argues with Pharisees more than anybody else. He gives them more time, more arguments than anybody else. And the truth is, you don’t argue with people with whom you’re very far apart. Just watch who argues with whom, and you will recognize that evangelicals will argue within themselves. The Baptists and Pentecostals will have their little argument. But the Baptists are not going to go argue with Catholics, because they’re too far apart. There are too many things that they disagree on. But they will pick at people who are most like them and they will find little things they disagree with — and that’s what the argument is.
So a lot of times what I find is Jesus has a lot of overlap with pharisaic teachings. They invite him over for dinner and he happily comes, and they actually think he’s one of them. When he doesn’t act like one of them, they’re surprised and they ask him questions of all sorts. There are a lot of settings in the Gospels where that happens. Pharisees don’t invite you over to their house for dinner if they don’t think that you are a reputable person, somebody they should be around. They’re a separatist group. That’s what Perushim means — parush means “a separate one.” Their very idea of their movement is to be separate. Yet they like to have Jesus over for dinner. So yeah, that tells you something. There’s actually quite a bit of closeness between them.
And remember, there’s more than one kind of Pharisee. Most people don’t realize that within the Pharisees, there are sects and groups and divisions. There are people who look to kill him after they disagree with him. And then there are people like Nicodemus who come to him at night and say, “Rabbi, we know you’re from God. There’s just a few things I don’t understand. Could you please help me out?” There are Pharisees who follow him. And that’s what you see in the book of Acts. There are plenty of Pharisees who follow Jesus, who admired his teachings, and understood it, and realized what he actually has done.
Raymond: Wow. Okay. So the Pharisees are kind of taking a hard line here.
Dr. Shir: Yeah. But I mean, it’s natural. If someone’s going to follow and serve the God of Israel, it’s necessary to be circumcised. It’s necessary to don the tzitzit, the fringes, and take on the law.
Raymond: So there’s a major dispute, a major discussion here, and James, the leader of the church, rises to his feet and he says, “No — Gentiles can remain Gentiles.”
Dr. Shir: Right. The problem for people — and again, like I said, it’s not what you eat, it’s who you eat with, a lot of times. A lot of Jews in that time considered Gentiles to be unacceptable in the form in which they were. And that’s the change that had to occur for Peter. That’s why he saw the vision. He needed to understand that if God is going to accept them just as they are, then they have to accept them just as they are — without conversion, without circumcision, without making the full circle. If the Holy Spirit can come and live in them just the way they are, then that’s good enough, essentially. Because that’s the end goal — to have that amazing close relationship with God. So if that’s possible for them without becoming Jews, then why do we need to force them through this path? That has been a path for us, but that’s because we’re born this way, we’re raised this way, we’ve been led this way for thousands of years. It’s a different sort of story — walking through the same door, essentially. Getting to the same end goal but taking a different route. And that’s what you see in the book of Acts.
So there are some rules that are being given. And I wouldn’t say that the majority of people in the Mediterranean were God-fearers. I think they were actually quite far away from God. But the ones that were coming — many of them were God-fearers because they were part of a synagogue, which is why they would hear the gospel. That’s where they would hear it, actually. As you read the story of Acts, people like Peter and Barnabas and Paul would go from one synagogue to another, and they would speak and teach. A lot of the Gentiles in the synagogues would be those God-fearers, and then some were converts — some had taken that step.
And of course the message that they hear is also controversial for them as well. You see that all throughout the book of Acts, where you have a lot of divisions and people disagree, and it even overflows into the book of Galatians. But we’re talking about the same communities. These are mixed communities for the most part, where you have God-fearers, you have proselytes, you have Gentiles who basically converted, and you have Jews who are born Jews. The gospel goes between all these categories and they all try to figure out: what do we do with this? How do we work this out?
Because never in history — and this has happened before — the message of Israel, the message of Torah, the message that there’s one God and you should worship him alone, has been around for a long time. But it has never resonated in the non-Jewish community in this way up until this moment. So what these Jews like Peter or Paul are experiencing is something new, something that has never happened before. And they’re not entirely prepared for what they should do. They read the prophets. The prophets say that in the last days people will come to Jerusalem and they will say, “Take us to the mountain of the Lord and show us how to walk in his ways.” We read these words in Isaiah and Zechariah — the nations streaming to Jerusalem, saying, “Show us the way. We want to worship God together with you, Israel.” But they’re not quite ready for that, because that moment is happening right there — at least according to Paul. Paul says this is it. This is happening now. God is attracting the nations to himself, which hasn’t happened before.
Raymond: Yes.
Dr. Shir: Nations were completely happy worshiping their gods, and all of a sudden now they’re abandoning that, saying, “We want to worship the one God of Israel.” Well, this is when Jews are not ready. “What do we do with them? We’re not quite ready to receive them.” So that’s why the apostles have this big meeting. They’re saying, “How do we treat this? We didn’t expect such a response,” because this was really something that God was doing. It was not something that they planned for.
Raymond: Yes. Okay. So James makes the pronouncement. Verse 19: “Therefore, I judge that we should not trouble those among the Gentiles who are turning to God, but we write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood.” And this is interesting — verse 21: “For Moses has throughout many generations those who preach him in every city, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath.”
Okay. So the question is: why not “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not bear false witness”? Why are we talking about those commandments?
Dr. Shir: Things strangled appear to have to do with food.
Raymond: Yeah, they are — polluted by food related.
Dr. Shir: Remember, the biggest problem of course would be table fellowship. The biggest problem would be: can we share a meal together? Most of the time in the Greco-Roman society, people expressed their affinity for each other and their friendship by sharing meals. If you wanted to be someone’s friend — not differently from today — you invite them over for dinner, you invite them over for lunch, you have a meal with them, and you share. That is a creation of a social bond.
So now imagine that you have these people who are not able to create a social bond because they have these obstacles standing in their way. For Jews, eating anything connected to idolatry is a huge obstacle. We talked about how something that’s clean can actually become unclean. Well, what’s going to make it unclean? Idolatry. If that item that you’re serving on the table came from a temple of Aphrodite because it was offered to her first — I can’t eat it, because that’s idol-contaminated, idol-polluted food.
So they’re being told: stay away from anything idol-contaminated, because if this fills your life, it’s going to be a problem for us to fellowship together. It’s going to be a problem for us to intersect, because we can’t touch it. We’re not allowed to do this. And if you’re going to bring this into our environment, you’re going to disrupt everything. Why would you want to do that? They’re being asked to abandon anything idol-related whatsoever. Have no connection to it.
And do not eat food with blood. The laws of slaughter within Jewish tradition require you to drain the blood. But non-Jews ate the same exact chicken and didn’t drain the blood. They would choke the chicken and trap all the blood inside. To them, that made it tastier — more nutritional value, higher iron levels. But for Jews, that’s a problem, because we’re specifically and expressly forbidden to do those things. The Torah tells you: you cannot eat blood. You can eat animals, but you cannot eat the blood that’s in them. Separate it. So there are different ways of eating and different ways of behaving. One of the biggest contrasts in this area is the whole idolatry and the blood issue.
The sexual immorality usually goes along with idolatry, because a lot of times those pagan temples had all sorts of debauchery. The rituals and rites that followed a lot of these food practices involved sexual immorality.
So the laws that are being given are not new laws. You can look them up — in Deuteronomy 18, for example. They’re called the laws of gerim, the sojourners within Israel. Non-Jews who decided to live within Jewish society actually had a set of laws that they had to follow. And those laws almost identically overlap with what the disciples give them. So it’s not a new thing. It’s more like they’re taking Deuteronomy and repackaging it, saying, “Yes, if you’re going to be with us, there are going to be some guidelines that you’re going to have to follow. And these are the ones that you really need to follow.”
Now, why not “do not kill” or “do not steal”? By the way, Roman law already had those covered. Most people already knew that those were not proper behaviors. Most laws in most countries do not welcome murder. They do not welcome theft. And if you’re going to be with us, then obviously believing in one God is going to be important — otherwise, what basis of a relationship do we even have?
So there are some commandments from the big ten that can be kicked off right away because they’re kind of assumed. But then there are some laws that are going to prohibit us from even having any kind of conversation or relationship. And these are the ones that we really want you to concentrate on. The other ones will work out. There are little things that will be worked out, because Moses is being taught everywhere.
Raymond: Exactly. You show up to synagogue every week, because that’s where we go.
Dr. Shir: Every city has them, and you’ll hear the Torah read, and eventually you’ll figure out what’s good for you and what’s not good for you, because the Torah is read publicly in the synagogue in a cyclical way, year after year. So however many years it’s going to take you to figure this out, eventually you’ll figure this out. And you’re going to be in the environment that will allow you to do so.
Raymond: It’s interesting — you just talked about that cycle, and that’s what I want to go to next. But I just want to say, in our last episode we talked about Cornelius in Acts chapter 10. He was a man that was associated with the synagogue. And so the implication here in verse 21 — “For Moses has throughout many generations those who preach” — is that the Gentiles we’re talking about here had a connection already with the Torah, with God’s laws. These are people who were already seeking out God.
Dr. Shir: They’re not just randomly — they may have their ethnic connections to their gods in their temples, but they’ve already walked towards the God of Israel because they have sought out something.
Raymond: Exactly.
Dr. Shir: And that’s what attracts them. And that’s why we’re talking about them in the first place, because we’re not talking about people who are not interested in any of these things. We’re not talking about people who are seeking out Jewish apostles and praying to the God of Israel out of nowhere. These people are clearly seeking the God of Israel and they’re looking for that connection.
Raymond: So it’s very interesting that those commandments for Gentiles have to do with eating with the Jewish community. And I’m wondering how many of us evangelical Christians have had the opportunity to sit down and have a meal with your local rabbi. If you’re a pastor, connect perhaps with a rabbi nearby. Develop that relationship.
Speaking of pastors and meeting with rabbis — a few years ago, I had 15 pastors, friends of mine, and we visited a shul, a synagogue in Toronto, a good friend of mine, Rabbi Grover. And when you talked earlier just a moment ago about cycles — I believe starting with the Babylonian exile, under Ezra, there’s no longer the temple worship, no longer the connection with the sacrificial system and the normal way of meeting with God. So he developed — he took the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and chopped them up into weekly portions. So there you began what’s called the parashah reading.
Dr. Shir: Yes.
Raymond: And so Jews around the world, every Shabbat, every Saturday morning, they’re all on the same page of the Bible, reading the same scripture. So Rabbi Grover brought us into a chapel and they opened up the Torah scroll. And the reading that Saturday was from Leviticus, including Leviticus chapter 19. He took out his — what is the rod that’s used with the little fingertip?
Dr. Shir: Yeah.
Raymond: And he started to read part of it, and I poked him and I said, “Look at what you’re reading.” I said, “You’re reading leket.” And he turned and he looked at me, stunned — because that’s the organization that I work with.
So we want to talk a little bit about it. There are various agricultural mitzvot — commandments — to help the needy. We can look at two of them right here. Verse 9: “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field. Nor shall you gather the leket, the gleanings of your harvest. And you shall not glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather every grape of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and the ger” — the stranger who had attached themselves to the people of Israel, like Ruth — “I am the Lord your God.”
So the mitzvah is: when the harvesters would go through the field, if anything would drop, the moment that item hit the ground, it no longer belonged to the farmer. So those who were in need would literally walk behind the harvesters and gather what was left over. And specifically with the story of Ruth — you remember Boaz telling his men — he could have just filled a sack of grain and given it to her. That would be charity. She now owes him something perhaps in return for his generosity. But no, he said, “Intentionally drop for her, and do not embarrass her.”
So there’s very much the concept in these agricultural laws of people retaining their dignity and the notion that all of our resources are not ours.
Dr. Shir: That’s right.
Raymond: It’s only the goodness of God. So there’s a sense in the agricultural laws that these belong to the needy. They’re not yours — you who are the farmer.
Dr. Shir: Yes. There are quite a few agricultural laws, and the one that you’re bringing up is a really important one. I think it actually lays at the core of the ethics of Judaism, and I think it lays at the core of the ethics of Christianity. If you read in James, it says: what is the pure and undefiled religion? That’s the question. And then he answers it: taking care of the poor and the widows and the orphans — those who do not have. There’s no pure faith according to James without that. And guess what? There’s no pure faith according to Judaism, either. If you read the Torah, one of the most important things that we’re supposed to do is take care of people who cannot take care of themselves. And you need to do it with dignity, as you mentioned.
Yes, we can just give a donation. We can just say, “Here, take this from me.” But really, taking it from God is way better — and that’s what the idea of gleaning the edges of the field is. Allowing people to take it for themselves. They have a responsibility to feed themselves, and they’re given that opportunity.
It’s an interesting commandment — to leave the corners of your field unharvested. The rabbis, when they discuss this particular mitzvah, go to great length trying to explain that there are a lot of commandments that have parameters, that have limits. This one has no limits. There are several things that have no limit, and one of them is charity — how much you give. You’re actually not told “don’t give more.” You’re told to give, but you’re not told to give this much and not more. The question they ask is: how big is the edge that I’m supposed to leave? And the answer is: however big you think you should leave the edge. There is no rule of how many feet there are at the edge of my field that I’m supposed to leave.
So I imagine different farmers left different sizes of those corners of their fields. And that really depended on their level of generosity, their own personal feeling of what their social responsibility is. Maybe their community had a lot of poor, maybe not. Maybe their community had a lot of destitute people who weren’t able to help themselves.
So imagine a society like Ruth and Boaz, where people can come and work in a field. Here’s the time of the harvest. You’re able-bodied? Come work. I’ll hire you. I have plenty of work for you to do. But if you’re not really able-bodied, if you’re not really able to work, then some people need to be provided for — you’re just giving it to them because they physically are unable.
Raymond: Yes, if they are physically unable to go and glean from the corners of the field —
Dr. Shir: That’s the best thing, because then that food comes directly from God. God is the one who makes that field grow. He’s the one who provides the rain and the sun. He’s the one who makes that food sprout. And so if it comes from one hand, from my hand, it’s okay. But if it comes directly from God, then I’m not even involved in this process. I’m just facilitating. I’m just making it happen. And I’m taking that same food from God as well. So that’s what you’re bringing up.
It’s a beautiful commandment, but it is a picture of our social responsibility toward those who are unable. And that carries over into today. There’s no difference today. There are people around us who are unable — they’re too sick, they’re too old, they’re too destitute to be able to provide for themselves. They have all these things going against them. And it always has been a responsibility of a community. God always judged the community by the way in which we helped our own. The same principle continues today.
Raymond: Wow. Excellent, Peter. Well, we’d like to encourage you — be a part of the Bible that God is still writing. Visit christianfriendsofleket.org — the link is below. We’d love to see you join us and partner with what God is doing in modern Israel. And Peter, thank you very much. Really enjoy this. Pir.com — the link is below. Peter, you’ve got a number of books: Apocalypse of Abraham, New Translation, Hebrew Insights from Revelation — now that sounds like something I definitely want to get into.
Dr. Shir: Trust me, it’s very tantalizing.
Raymond: Absolutely. And Missing Ingredients — it looks like a recipe book. It’s a recipe for a greater understanding of God’s word, and it’s a really good read, and I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you very much, Peter, for sharing with us. Let’s do it again.
Dr. Shir: Sounds good.