You're listening to the Bible for normal people, the only God ordained podcast on the internet.

Serious talk about the sacred book. I'm Pete Ends. And I'm Jared Bias.

Welcome back everyone. Today we're going to be having a conversation with Kent

Sparks, who is professor of Old Testament at Eastern University and also serves as

provost, which means he can actually think about the Seek and Fire himself folks.

He's in a unique position. And he might if he gets on his own nerves. I think I would

well, anyway, we'll give him some feedback on whether he needs to do that after this conversation.

But he has interestingly an interesting background bachelor's degree and master's degree

in biblical studies and Old Testament, but he also has an MBA. Yeah, that's very unusual

that combination. Yeah, and has been a pastor as well as having a PhD from the University

of North Carolina studying with John van Cedars, Bart Erman. So he has quite the pedigree

background. No, like, yeah, very diverse background. One of the more diverse people that I've met

in this field. Yeah, so personally, Kent Sparks, I met him through his writings first and his book,

God's Word and Human Words, I read when I was a pastor and it was really one of those foundational

books that started to shift how I thought about scripture and what we what we maybe should be doing

with it. Yeah, and he's he's written some academic books and also some more popular books, but they

also center on a theme of challenging conventional notions of how the Bible is read and understood.

And today, we have him on the podcast because he has a book coming out. I really hope it's this

year 2017. It might wind up being 2018, but a new book on a actually, it's a very super serious

academic contribution to probably the biggest mystery of Old Testament studies, namely, where did

the Israelites come from? There's the biblical story, but then there are archaeological and historical

factors as well to take into account and it winds up being quite a difficult topic that everyone

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