“Now Adonai your God has given rest to your kinsmen, as he told them he would. So you too, return to your tents in the land which is your possession, which Moshe the servant of Adonai gave you beyond the Yarden.”-Joshua 22:4
Verse 4 provides us a perfect example of what we need to be on guard for when we’re studying the Scriptures.
Here Joshua is telling the 2 and 1/2 tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh that they may “return back to their tents”.
We’ll, here’s the thing homies.
The Israelites were NOT living in tents at this time.
They were living in established towns, villages and cities.
In other words, there was a permanent dwelling infrastructure in place that was anything but a so-called “tent”.
So what we have here is a common idiom that doesn’t necessarily mean what it says.
Keep in mind this generation of Israelites was born and raised in the wilderness.
Therefore, the language of the Bedouins had been firmly embedded into their everyday thoughts and as a result was reflected in their normal words and phrases.
Heck, we do the same thing with our modern languages today.
We just don’t think about it.
For example, take a phrase like...”I don’t mean to keep beating a dead horse but blah, blah, blah”.
Of course, when we use that phrase today, it just means we don’t mean to belabor the same point over and over again.
But obviously the origins of that phrase come from a cowboy culture that has long since come and gone.
Again, there are tons of idiomatic expressions like this in the Bible and it’s darn important we recognize them when we come across ’em.
Why?
Because if we don’t, we’ll make the mistake that practically every Christian pastor and his grandmother makes which is to take some common Biblical expression and twist it into meaning something entirely different to the original generation who spoke it.
When we take what was in fact just a common idiom of the day and make it into some kind of literal Biblical principle or doctrine, that’s when we start birthing all kinds of weird theology that was NEVER intended by the Scriptures in the first place.
Do you hear me homies?
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