Every Bible you have ever owned labels Deuteronomy 24 same way. They all call Deuteronomy 24:1-4 "The Law of Divorce" —but what if that's not what the passage is about at all?

In this episode, Mark walks through Deuteronomy 24:1-4 word by word, drawing on the work of Raymond Westbrook to make the case that this passage is not giving permission for divorce, not restricting divorce, and not establishing grounds for divorce. It is doing something else entirely — something far more specific, far more historically grounded, and far more protective of women than the standard reading ever allowed.

Also drawing on Babylonian law, the Code of Hammurabi, the Laws of Eshnunna, and biblical narratives involving Abraham, Sarah, David, and Michal, this conversation uncovers why ancient legal context completely changes how we read the passage.

In this episode:

- Why Deuteronomy 24:1-4 is not a divorce law

- The certificate of divorce — what it meant for a woman in the ancient world

- The key word in verse 4 — "defiled" — and why nobody has ever adequately explained what it means or why it applies here

- Why the Hebrew word toevah — abomination — is used for a man who takes back his ex-wife, the same word used for idolatry and child sacrifice

- Raymond Westbrook's argument about what the passage is actually protecting against - How misreading this passage has shaped Christian teaching on divorce and remarriage for 2,000 years

📚 Sources & Scholars Mentioned:

Raymond Westbrook — ancient Near Eastern legal scholar, work on biblical divorce law

David Instone-Brewer — Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible (Eerdmans)

Bernard Jackson — Wisdom Laws: A Study of the Mishpatim

Samuel Greengus — Laws in the Bible and in Early Rabbinic Collections

Did they actually find the real biblical city of Sodom?

In 1996, Dr. Steven Collins was leading a Bible study tour of Israel and Jordan. The next morning he was scheduled to take his group to the traditional sites of Sodom and Gomorrah in the south. That night he read Genesis 13 through 19 four times. By the end of it he had written two large question marks on his itinerary.Nothing in the text pointed south.

Everything pointed north and east of the Dead Sea.What followed was 16 seasons of excavation at Tal al-Hammam — the largest Bronze Age city in the entire southern Levant — and one of the most compelling and controversial cases in the history of biblical archaeology.

Dr. Mark Chavalas sits down with Dr. Steven Collins — Dean of the VIU School of Archaeology and the lead excavator at Tal al-Hammam — to walk through the full case. The biblical geography. The site itself. The destruction event. And what 21 scientific proxies found in a single destruction layer tell us about what actually happened to this city roughly 3,700 years ago.

In this episode:

- Why Genesis 13 places Sodom northeast of the Dead Sea — not south

- Why every city in the region survived the Intermediate Bronze Age except this one

- The gate system, the palace, the temple — what 16 seasons of excavation actually found

- The destruction layer — violently churned debris unlike anything else in the archaeological record

- The cosmic airburst argument

- The Egyptian execration texts and the name Shutu

- The chronology question — why the biblical patriarchal lifespans may not be literal numbers What it means for the rest of Scripture if the most doubted story in the Bible turns out to be historically grounded

The debate around the site's identification as Sodom remains active and contested in the scholarly community. This episode presents Dr. Collins' case as he makes it — a serious scholar's argument built on decades of fieldwork, not settled consensus.

📚 Sources & Scholars Mentioned

Stephen Collins & Latayne Scott — Discovering the City of Sodom (Howard Books, 2013)

Barry Beitzel — Lexham Geographic Commentary — articles on northern and southern Sodom

Anson Rainey — The Sacred Bridge — historical geography including the Shutu identification

Craig Olson — How Old Was Father Abraham?

Lane Ritmeyer — chief architect and architectural reconstruction specialist at Tal al-Hammam

Gary Byers — assistant director at Tal al-Hammam, now leads TSU College of Archaeology

One of the strangest passages in the entire Bible - the Goring Ox laws of Exodus 21.

It sounds like the most irrelevant law in all of Scripture — until you realize it's almost word-for-word identical to laws found in Mesopotamia hundreds of years older than Moses.

Dr. Mark Chavalas traces the Goring Ox laws of Exodus 21 through Sumerian scribal texts, the Laws of Eshnunna, the Code of Hammurabi, and a real ancient court case from Nuzi — drawing on J.J. Finkelstein's landmark study, The Ox That Gored. The wording is nearly identical across cultures. But one detail changes everything about why the Bible treats this law so differently.

In this episode:

- Why Goring Ox laws show up almost everywhere in the ancient Near East

- The Eshnunna parallel that reads almost like a direct copy of Exodus 21

- Why Mesopotamian law never says what happens to the ox — but the Bible insists it must be stoned

- Why the Israelites were forbidden from eating its meat

- J.J. Finkelstein's argument...

- What this reveals about a radically different view of human life and dignity

This is one of the clearest examples in the entire Old Testament of laws that look almost identical to their ancient neighbors on the surface — and turn out to be saying something completely different underneath.

📚 Sources & Scholars Mentioned

⬩ J.J. Finkelstein — The Ox That Gored (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1981)

⬩Martha Roth — Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor

⬩Bridget Lyons — translator, Judicial Decisions in the Ancient Near East

⬩Jacob Milgrom — Leviticus commentary (Anchor Bible series)

⬩Harry Hoffner — "Incest, Sodomy, and Bestiality in the Ancient Near East" (in honor of Cyrus Gordon, 1973)