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1:20
This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it.
1:26
All right, guys. We got a special guest on the podcast today. His name is John Beck. He also
1:30
goes by Jack. So we have those names kind of interchange throughout the interview here,
1:33
but he is a biblical geographer, professor, and author. He's also the host of a docu series called
1:38
The Holy Land, connecting the land with its stories. And he's the author of this book,
1:42
which we talked about here on the show, Our Daily Bread Bible Atlas. And so the thing
1:46
about an interview like this is this is obviously a unique guy. I've talked to a biblical archaeologist,
1:50
but not like a biblical geographer, but it's kind of nebulous. Like what exactly does that mean?
1:54
But he really during this interview for me brought the Bible to life. He told some stories on here
1:59
that I was like literally on the edge of my seed. It's similar to what he does with The Holy Land
2:04
Show. It's similar to what he has here in the book. But there are certainly some times and some
2:08
stories in the Bible, some historical accounts from the Bible that if you understand the geography
2:13
of what's going on and where you're doing it and where it's taking place, it changes the story for
2:18
you. It deepens your level of understanding of the Bible. And so that's the intro for today. I just
2:23
want us to get right in and get after it. So without further ado, let's get into it. John Beck,
2:28
welcome down to the life of man's podcast. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Kyle. Appreciate
2:32
the chance to visit. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we're going to get into kind of your job. And we talked
2:37
a little bit off air because what you're technically called, no one really knows what that is. So we
2:41
got to dispel with some rumors. We got to do some detective work today. But above everything else
2:46
in any other title you have, you carry the title of Christ follower. And so let's just kind of start
2:51
there because, you know, in our audience, we got guys that just became Christians today. Hopefully,
2:56
amen. And then we got guys that have been raised in it and we had got, you know, crazy conversions,
3:01
non crazy conversions. So let's just start there. How'd you become a follower of Christ?
3:04
Yeah, so I was blessed to grow up in a Christian home. So mom and dad led me into the faith early
3:12
on. And to the point that Kyle, I can't really remember consciously a time when I wasn't a follower
3:20
of Christ. And so you're a follower of Christ from an early age. And I just got to tell you,
3:24
so I didn't grow up like, so I grew up in Oklahoma. So you're a Christian because you're born in
3:28
Oklahoma is kind of how it works here. But you got to, you know, occasionally vote Republican and listen
3:32
to 90s country music. And then you check the boxes and God let you in the club, right? And so I
3:37
just love hearing stories from people that have the upbringing, you know, growing up in a Christian
3:41
household. However, we won't spend a lot of time here, but I am just curious, I have talked to some
3:46
people that they almost diminish their impact that they can have for the kingdom because they
3:51
were raised around it because they never it's like they never had any other choice. You know,
3:56
they don't have that dramatic testimony of there I was with the heroin needle hanging out of my arm
4:00
and the belts till wrapped around it and blah, blah, blah. They're just like, yeah, you know,
4:03
I memorized scripture as a kid. We went to church three times a week and, you know,
4:08
we went to a wana and vacation Bible school and all that. So for you, did you ever have kind of
4:12
that internal dissonance about I've just kind of always been this person and, you know, maybe I
4:16
can't have a big impact. Yeah, so I think all of us who have sort of had my experience have that a
4:23
little bit, right? So this was the faith of my parents. Is it really going to be my faith? Is this
4:30
what I believe? And so I think from an early age on, I was a Bible reader and I would go back to
4:38
my bedroom and I would read the text. And as I read the text, the Holy Spirit went to work on me
4:45
and it wasn't very long before those questions sort of fell to the wayside. I just felt myself
4:52
growing more and more closely connected to the Father through the Son. Okay, that's spectacular
4:58
and that's actually inspirational for me. I'm a father of a five year old and three year old boy.
5:03
And obviously I want nothing more than for them to become followers of Christ. And, you know, I
5:08
learned this from a guy a while ago where it's like, you know, I was praying with my kids. So
5:13
dads were hearing dad praying and they got to, you know, pray themselves. But then I started
5:18
praying over my kids and saying like, Hey, like, Lord, just thank you so much for these boys. I'm
5:23
so glad for how smart and strong they become. I pray that they get stronger and more courageous
5:27
and that they would eventually become servants of you God. And you know, that kind of thing. So I'm
5:31
like praying that over my sons. But at some point you, I don't know if this is when you were a kid or
5:36
what you got an interest in geography. And so now some people, their interest in geography just,
5:42
you know, begins and ends with the maps that are at the end of their Bible or something like that.
5:46
But for you, it went a little deeper than that. So let's talk about how you kind of
5:49
developed or discovered that interest in geography. Yeah. So I would say my interest in geography and
5:56
my interest in the geography of the Bible actually happened at two different stages of my life. Okay.
6:01
Yeah. So step one, geography. I think there's a couple of places that my love for the outdoors
6:08
really grew. One was on my grandparents, dairy farm. They had a dairy farm in Wisconsin. I was
6:14
one of the oldest grandchildren. And so I spent a lot of time doing field work out there, taking
6:19
care of the livestock. And wow, I loved it. I mean, I just felt really connected to it. And the other
6:25
wasn't my parents were adventure travelers. And we love to go to the mountain west. We'd spend
6:31
a month and a half every year just rambling through the Rocky Mountains over ridge lines.
6:36
And that also sort of lit me up. And so the geography part of me was very much alive early on,
6:45
but it never really was integrated closely to the Bible reading me.
6:50
Okay. And so it's one thing to kind of experience those types of areas and experience those types
6:57
of things, but then to bring geography and the Bible together. How does that really start to
7:04
happen? Like tangibly, like to where it's just like, okay, I'm not just interested in the Bible
7:08
over here. And I'm interested in geography over here. And there's really no crossover. Like,
7:12
did you force the crossover? Or did it just kind of like meld together naturally?
7:18
Yeah, so here I'm going to talk about a geographic conversion of my Bible reading. And for this,
7:24
I've got a pretty clear picture in my mind of when that happened, Kyle. I was in a graduate school
7:29
setting working on a PhD. I was a linguist focused in on the refining my skill set and
7:38
understanding Greek and Hebrew, I was teaching in the university at the time those languages. So
7:43
very much a part of my life. And I landed in a classroom, I think not by accident, by the
7:50
spirit's leading, in a classroom where Dr. Barry Baidzel, Bible geographer, was introducing the idea
8:00
of reading the Bible with geographical awareness. And we started looking at Matthew 413,
8:05
leaving Nazareth, Jesus went and lived in Capernaum. And my goodness, from that moment on, I began
8:13
to see what a vital role geography played in the communication process generally, and in the Bible
8:20
in particular. And I was hooked, that was 30 years ago, 30 years ago. Okay, so early on, did you get
8:27
a bunch of weird looks like, Hey, Jack, we're just reading the Bible right now. And you're sitting
8:31
there like kind of like super interested in kind of where they were walking, where they were going,
8:35
because I'll say for me, it's interesting as I was looking through some of the work you've done on
8:40
YouTube and your new book, which will we'll get to all that stuff. It's like, yeah, the cool
8:45
thing about this is these are not just stories, we call them Bible stories, right? But this is
8:50
history. And you know, between biblical geography and archaeology and different things like that,
8:55
like no, these were real occurrences between real people in real places, places that you can still
9:00
visit on earth. Now, just like, you know, the valley where David killed Goliath and all that,
9:05
I mean, there's a lot of farmland there now, it doesn't look like it did back in that day.
9:09
But you know, it's just, did you get people that were like, Hey, I don't really get the point
9:12
why are you so interested in this? Yeah, all the time, right? All the time, because a lot of folks
9:19
here, I'm a Bible geographer and think that I'm a cartographer, I build maps and you know,
9:24
I do help with that. But that really isn't my, my point of focus. So the easiest way for me to
9:30
get people in that doorway is to say, look, think about your own human experience. We are all people
9:37
of place, who we are, how we think, how we most naturally communicate, very much a product of
9:44
where we're from. I sound very much like I'm from the state of Wisconsin. It won't take long for me
9:51
to drop in phrases like we went up north this weekend, or we're going to have lake effect snow
9:57
later today. You know, these are these are local language choices that are informed by my place.
10:04
And, and we are full of that as communicators. We, we drop place and place influence into our
10:12
communication all the time. And good heavens is that any surprise then that the biblical
10:17
authors and poets did the same. Yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, it's easy to kind of skip over
10:23
details to skip over genealogies to skip over Nehemiah chapter three, where it's like, all right,
10:28
well, this family worked on the dungate and this family worked on this part of the wall. But it's
10:31
like, it was there for a reason. It's put there for a reason. And, you know, there aren't just red
10:36
letters in the Bible, because that's what Jesus said. If you believe in the Trinity, they're all
10:39
red letters. And so they're, they're all important in one way or another, right? So let's talk about.
10:43
Yeah, I mean, I, we're putting it, you know, it's a great way of putting it because the,
10:48
the, all of our communication is economical. We don't say more than we need to say. And that's
10:55
very true of the Bible. And so everything that's in there has already been edited back to the
11:01
essentials. And among the essentials is geography. Right. And so a challenge, and this is a challenge
11:07
for anybody that reads the Bible. And this is the challenge that I would throw to them is,
11:10
as you're reading the Bible, especially if you're, you know, maybe in the doldrums of the Old
11:14
Testament or whatever, it's like, Christ is in there. And so it's like, you're, you're reading
11:19
through this and you don't know how this connects. Yeah, reading John might be a lot more palatable
11:22
to you and a lot more familiar. But I mean, even me and my, my group of guys here, we've been
11:27
digging into Genesis for the last, you know, almost a year. And it's like, there's sometimes
11:31
we're just like, I don't really care. And you feel like bogged down, but it's like no crisis in here
11:35
somewhere, even if I don't recognize it and then pray for the Holy Spirit to reveal that wisdom to
11:39
you. And then all this kind of circles the drain around the same place in the world,
11:43
which is Israel, which is a place that I have not been able to go to yet. Hopefully,
11:46
I can get there before too long. Obviously, there are some different security concerns
11:50
with going there. But for you, when is the first time that you were able to go to Israel?
11:55
Yeah. So my first trip to Israel was after that class I was describing before with Barry Bites.
12:01
So I went with him in the late 1990s, about 1996, '97, somewhere in there. And I thought it was
12:09
going to be a one and done thing, right? I thought I was going to go collect my impressions, collect
12:14
my photographs and leave and use those for the rest of my teaching career. But that wasn't the Lord's
12:22
plan. And so you went there that first time, how many times can you even count and how many times
12:28
you've been there since? Yeah, I often get that question and I've long since lost count. It's in
12:33
the hundreds. Hundreds of times. Okay. Well, I got a lot of questions as it pertains to that,
12:39
but let me just kind of go back. I remember being a college, just again, I was ignorant.
12:43
You know, my brain was six years away from being fully developed. And so it's like, you know,
12:47
it's a thing, right? But I remember a buddy saying he was going to Israel and I immediately think
12:52
to myself, I'm like, he's probably going to die. Like you can't just go to Israel. Like there's
12:56
going to be some jihadist that's going to try to chop your head off if you like accidentally like
13:00
pretend to be Christian or Jewish. And so obviously they're there and I don't mean to belittle the
13:05
violence that has happened there. Obviously with October 7th and different things like that. That's
13:08
exactly what Islamists, jihadist, fundamentalist want to do is to chop off the heads of all Westerners,
13:14
Americans and Jews first, right? And so but for you having been there hundreds of times,
13:19
have you ever had any kind of sketchy security situations? Because you're not just going to,
13:23
to the, you know, to the main places and you're not just hanging out where there's, you know,
13:28
trinkets that you can buy. You're kind of going off the beaten path quite a bit.
13:30
Yeah. So I would say it's like any other place I've been in the world and not entirely different
13:38
from my home here in the Midwest. There are places that I can go where I know there's a greater
13:45
likelihood that there'll be some sort of social personal trouble going on. Same is true in Israel,
13:52
but I would say 98% of the time that I'm in a place. I don't even think about that. I'm caught
13:59
up in the space that I'm working in, teaching in and security is way off the grid of my attention.
14:07
All right. Well, let's let's get in. Well, we'll kind of find this nice soft place to land.
14:11
Some people like Jews and atheists are kind of, they're kind of weirded out, like why are Christians
14:17
so into Israel and all those types of things. But for me, I remember, again, back in college,
14:22
I wanted to go to Ireland because I was like the place of my forefathers. And I wanted to go
14:26
to Rome because of the Colosseum and Gladiator was my favorite movie and wanted to go to Scotland
14:30
because scotch is the best in all the things. But then like the more, the farther I've gotten
14:36
in my sanctification process, if you will, the draw to Israel is just palpable. Like it's at the
14:42
tippy top of my list. And again, like I said, we're, we're trying to figure out the timing
14:46
in the location and actually making that happen. But what would you say to Christians that have
14:50
never been to Israel, but potentially do have the means and have the timing to where they could
14:57
make that happen at some point in their life? A couple of things I'd offer. One is just a reminder
15:03
that just like us, the stories of the Bible have places. And just like you'll know me better because
15:09
you know where I'm from. And and my place, you will understand the Bible at brand new levels
15:15
when you know that space. That's one. The second thing I would say is be ready to be surprised.
15:22
Because it is a place of extreme geographic diversity. About every 15 miles, you end up changing the
15:33
nature of the ecosystem. The topography changes. The plant communities change. The way in which
15:40
people lived in that space in Bible times changes. And so if you're going to the Holy Land in order
15:47
to learn a single geographic reality, be ready because they're barbed by my account somewhere around
15:56
13 to 14 different sub regions, sub ecosystems that become unique in the way in which they
16:04
contribute to the shaping of the Bible's communication. Okay. And so what would you say to, and I'm sure
16:11
you've dealt with this with with this being your life's work. What would you say to the people that
16:15
are like, look, dude, like, Jack, I get it, you're excited. This is, you know, you like this kind of
16:20
stuff. But like, what do we even like, why do we need to do this? Like, why do we need to go to
16:27
these places? Like, what does it matter if we can actually see those places or not?
16:30
Yeah, it matters because we are always going to put a picture in with the language of scripture.
16:41
And if we put a picture that's different than the reality of that land, whether it's the setting for
16:48
Psalm 23 or how people thought about rainfall, whatever that picture is in our mind's eye. And
16:56
it's often one that reflects our own geographic experiences. We're going to be putting something
17:03
on the text that will change the way that text reads. So what I'm trying to do is say, all right,
17:10
we know what the authentic picture was from Bible times. So let's go get it. Let's get the geographic
17:17
realities of that space in our mind's eye. And when we do, we're going to see things we hadn't seen
17:24
before, because that will percolate up through the language of scripture.
17:28
When I feel like you've you've done that with your book. So obviously I'm showing the book here
17:32
on screen, guys, look, it's nice. It's nice hardcover book, put our daily bread Bible, Alice. But you
17:36
kind of freaked me out because it says John back on here, but I see Jack on the screen here. So you're
17:40
you made me like feel nervous at the beginning because I felt like I called you the wrong name on
17:44
accident. But that's kind of what you do here is you've got you've got this book and it kind of
17:49
helps you understand like, look, no, because I have a very overactive imagination. And so part of the
17:55
problem is is sometimes that can like spin me off into the ether. But then there are other times
17:59
to where it's like I have this image in my brain of where these things have taken place and what
18:03
the grounds look like in topography. And but the problem is in my brain, I just assumed everybody's
18:07
covered in saying the entire time. But obviously, if you've gone to Israel, different things like that,
18:12
yes, there are certainly sandy places, but there's incredibly lush places as well. So it was that
18:16
kind of the point of our daily bread atlas or Bible atlas to kind of help people really bring
18:21
these things together so that kind of changes their overall Bible reading experience, if you will.
18:25
I would take it even a step beyond that, Kyle, and it's designed to connect place to text
18:32
as a kind of geographic commentary. For those who've picked up a Bible atlas of another kind,
18:38
you'll find lots of maps on some description of places. But what this Bible atlas does is
18:47
become intentional about saying, here's what the place is like, and here's why that's important
18:54
to this story. And that second part is what's critical and unique to this Bible atlas. It is not
19:01
just about the place, but about the integration of place and text. And just I want to read actually
19:09
the contents, because I think it's interesting. So people kind of know what they would have in
19:14
mind with the book, general geography of the Promised Land, creation and Abraham's family,
19:20
Egypt exodus in the wilderness, conquest and settlement, Samuel and the United Kingdom,
19:26
not the UK. Come on, guys. The divided kingdoms, exile and return between the Testaments,
19:31
birth and early years of Jesus, Jesus and Galilee, Samaria, Judea, and among the Gentiles,
19:36
and from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. So guys, that pretty much covers the entire Bible,
19:40
so it kind of gives you an idea here. But I specifically want to double click on the stuff
19:45
concerning Jesus, because I remember Titus Kennedy is a friend of mine who's a biblical
19:50
archaeologist. And for him, his faith, I believe he grew up in a faith tradition as well, as a
19:56
Christian. But when he started like archaeologically digging and experiencing the world, where Jesus
20:03
walked, it's kind of like, again, when I was on college, I wanted to go to Rome. And I'm like,
20:06
Oh my gosh, you know, Caesar could have walked right here and Mark Anthony and all this is so
20:10
crazy. And then it's like, but then we also visited where Paul was imprisoned, right? And it's like,
20:15
man, there's hollow ground, there's holy ground, and then there's whatever that is, right? And so
20:20
like for you as a believer, you already believed in this Middle Eastern Jewish construction worker
20:25
that died on a Roman cross at the behest of the Jewish andhedrin. But what was it like when you
20:30
got to like see where he was in Jerusalem, seagull gotha, those types of things?
20:36
Yeah. So I would describe it like this, you know, a lot of my Bible reading high familiarity with
20:43
the content, right? After having read the Bible my whole life, but it all was sort of just floated
20:48
above the land, kind of hovered around. And to whatever degree that diminished the reality of the
20:56
story long, it changed dramatically when I dropped that story down into the landscape. And I was
21:04
noticing my goodness, this is as if the writer and I are standing in the same place looking at the
21:11
same setting and the description matches the place. And I don't know why that should be so
21:17
terribly surprising or affirming, but it but it was and continues to be. It is the description
21:26
of the place in the Bible that looks exactly like what my eyes are touching on the landscape.
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Hey guys, real quick. Do you remember during the pandemic when you basically couldn't get
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at Undaunted Life, I wanted to make sure that I partnered with an American company that actually
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undaunted to get 10% off your order. Man, I like you're you're getting me even more excited about
23:10
going there and potentially seeing these places and making that part of my Christian walk like
23:14
literally and figuratively, because when you're in those places. So right now there's a very popular
23:20
show on Amazon, it's a house of David. And again, the very first screen it says, look, this is not a
23:26
you know, a direct retelling of every biblical or historical detail. Obviously, they're taking
23:31
some poetic license because we don't have, you know, a transcript of all the conversations
23:36
between David and King Saul when that he was playing the heart form and all that. And so,
23:40
but I thought it was done spectacularly well. But part of it's like, all that happened in real
23:45
places. Now some of those buildings are not there anymore. Some of the palaces have long since been
23:50
destroyed and ransacked and all that. But the valley where these battles took place and where
23:56
that particular battle took place, which was a foreshadowing of Jesus, you know, conquering death
24:02
on the cross, you know, which is where Goliath's head was very likely buried was right there on
24:06
Golgotha, the place of a skull. Like just tell me how even specifically that story I brought up
24:11
here for the second time now, how that's different when you're standing in the valley.
24:15
Yeah, so it all makes sense, right? So if I'm facing East and I'm looking at the mountains of
24:26
the central mountain spine rising up in front of me, that's where David, David Tom of Bethlehem is.
24:32
That's where a north south roadway called the Ridge Route runs. And I realize that if I can get from
24:40
where I am on the way to that Ridge, there's no place in the mountain interior. I can't go.
24:47
So it's strategically important that that place be defended. So if I look behind me,
24:55
that's to the west towards the Mediterranean Sea. That's where the Felistans are. The Sea
25:00
Peoples are located. And if they're going to get to that Ridge Route on the mountain interior,
25:08
they need to conquer this valley system in the foothills, the ala valley system in route. And
25:16
of course, that's exactly where the battle takes place. So when I begin to read that story,
25:22
I'm not surprised then that front loaded in that story is a whole bunch of geography.
25:28
You know, sometimes I'll ask folks, tell me the story of David and Goliath. And they never
25:33
start where the story does. They don't start with all the geographical information that's
25:38
provided there. And you go, well, what in the world is that starting point all about? By
25:44
identifying where this battle is occurring, the strategic importance of the outcome
25:51
is elevated tenfold. And I create that tension as a writer before I tell you the story. And if
25:59
you miss a geography and the realities of the land, you'll miss what the writer is doing to
26:05
prepare you to read that story. That's such a great point because my wife and I were sitting
26:11
there. We were just enraptured with the house of David and raptured with the show. And then there
26:16
were a few things that happened. They were like, wait, did that happen? Like, and then it's like,
26:19
shoot, okay, we need to go back to the source material here and figure out like, are we being
26:23
taken on a journey? Did we get Hollywood eyes a little bit or Amazon Prime to however you want to
26:28
call it? And then, you know, what what specifically does that look like? But I feel like that's
26:33
something that you've done so well with your series called the Holy Land. And this is where
26:37
well, I'll let you talk about it. So let's talk about the Holy Land. This is a docu series that
26:42
you've done. You've done it for multiple seasons. So what is this? How did how did you come up with
26:46
the idea or who came up with the idea? Like, you know, why why do this? Yeah, so let me first
26:51
differentiate it from the book. Lots of overlap because same guy, right? The book moves as you
26:59
observe before Kyle chronologically. So we're moving like I would read the Bible from one side
27:05
to the other. The docu series moves geographically. And in that respect, it's moving like I teach,
27:12
I teach for Jerusalem University College in Israel to field study programs for them. And this is how
27:17
I teach the land. It's because one place holds stories from across the Ark of the Old and New
27:26
Testament. And if I were to teach the geography of the land, if I were to teach the geography
27:35
in the land in the same way that the book is written, I would have to keep coming back to the
27:39
same place repeatedly. But reality is I go to one place, I impact the geographic realities of that
27:47
subregion, Judas Hill country, Shafala, Judean wilderness, Dead Sea, we unpack it all from the
27:53
ground up the geology, the formation story, how this water works and drains in that space. We go
28:00
through all of that. And then we talk about how all of that geography helps shape stories that
28:07
are unique to that space. And essentially what I do in the field with a group of students is what
28:14
I do in the docu series. We go to one region, we unpack the geographic realities of that space,
28:22
how it lived differently than other places. And then we go into the stories that fit there. And
28:28
here's something that's axiomatic. You can't take a story that occurs in one of those regions,
28:34
move it to another region, and have the same story. So I'm honoring the uniqueness of the setting
28:42
and then retelling those stories in the places where they were born.
28:46
I appreciate you giving us the delineation between our Daily Bread Bible Atlas and the
28:51
Holy Land docu series. And so as I was getting ready for this podcast, I hate asking questions
28:56
that people have been asked before because I love for my interviews to be intellectually stimulating.
29:01
That's why I actually consume the content before I have the person on. But all I could come up with
29:06
were selfishly generic questions because I want the answers. So you're about to get a lightning
29:11
round of several of those. So what is your favorite place that you've been like if you had to hang
29:17
your hat in terms of places you've been that are described in the Bible? What's number one?
29:22
Wow. There are so many that I love and for different reasons, right? There are places that I love
29:28
most because of you is so spectacular. There's other places that I love because they produce
29:33
such unique geographic outcomes. But there's also places that rise in elevation because for me,
29:40
personally, there's spiritual value of being in that place is elevated. So I'll speak to the last
29:46
one because I think that one might be the most interest to your listeners and viewers.
29:51
It's the Garden of Get Summony on the Mount of Olives. And they're just a series of Mount
30:02
of Olives stories during Passion Week that I love to bring together. But I'm going to focus
30:07
in on the one that really changes me every time that I am there. After Jesus finished,
30:16
in the upper room with the disciples, we are on the cusp of his arrest. But before we get to that
30:22
moment, Jesus leads the disciples out of the city and onto the western ridge of the Mount of Olives
30:31
to a garden called the Garden of Get Summony. Not a garden in the sense of a vegetable garden or
30:38
flower garden, but an industrial olive grove. That's where he is. And what happens there in the
30:46
language of the text is stunning because at no other point do the gospel writers ever describe
30:54
the mental state, the physical posturing language like they deliver when we listen in
31:02
and watch Jesus in that place. Clearly, he's asking his father, is there another way? Can I
31:10
take a pass on what's about to come? And certainly the nearness of the moment, right? He's about to
31:18
be arrested and he'll close his life on earth off as a prisoner of the state. So that clearly is in
31:25
play here. But let me take you to the geography because it's that geography that makes me feel like
31:32
my eternity is hanging in the balance. If I'm on the Mount of Olives, it's a two mile long ridge.
31:38
If I'm on this Mount of Olives ridge line and I look to the right or to the east facing north,
31:44
I am looking out into the Judean wilderness, a trackless dry space that is so under resourced,
31:52
there's nobody out there. It's an empty place. It's a place you go to get away from everyone else.
31:57
If I look to my left, to the west, I'm looking into the city of Jerusalem. This is where the
32:05
Roman agency is. It's going to come out and arrest Jesus and, sorry, the Jewish leadership is going
32:11
to come out and arrest Jesus and participate with Roman agency and having him executed. There's
32:17
two very different storylines that could develop, depending on what Jesus does next. If, as he
32:24
struggles in prayer, he does what's best for him, Kyle, he goes east over the ridge into the
32:29
wilderness within 35 minutes, he's out of reach. What's so striking to me, this is exactly what
32:35
David did. When King David was being threatened by his son Absalom, David left the capital city
32:44
through the Kedron Valley up over the Mount of Olives into the wilderness and he got away from it
32:48
all. That option was a live option for Jesus. The other option, the one that's best for me,
32:53
the one that I needed him to do is turn back towards the city. I feel that incredible moment
33:00
of tension, like I never have felt anywhere before in the gospel account, where Jesus is on the verge
33:05
of saying, "I'm not going to complete this mission that you need me to complete. I'm going to go off
33:11
into the wilderness and do what's best for me." And then the moment comes where he pivots and he
33:16
walks back to the disciples and says to them, "Rise, let's go. Here comes my betrayer. The decision is
33:24
made. He's not going out into the wilderness like David had done to escape the harm. He's going back
33:29
into the city to experience the harm so that I can have an eternity with him." Wow. I mean, that's
33:37
again, you missed that. You missed that if you don't understand the geography. So what a poignant
33:41
thing to share. I appreciate how you share that with the audience. It's very, very powerful.
33:45
One thing you mentioned also earlier is about being ready to be surprised and you were basically
33:51
talking about how there are so many different types of topographies and geography or whatever,
33:56
however you like to couch it. But for you, what have been, I always like to the ultimate thing,
34:02
but what have been some of the most surprising or shocking things that you've discovered during
34:07
your time researching the region? Yeah. So there's two ways that Bible content connects
34:13
us to place. Sometimes it's through the physical and human geography. We just talked about the
34:18
proximity of wilderness to the Mount of Olives and how that physical reality played a role in that
34:24
story. There are other times where a teaching location of Jesus plays into the fact that something
34:33
important had happened there before. And this is a reality. Again, people have to take account
34:38
of when they go to the Holy Land for the first time. It's an incredibly small land, only 145 miles
34:44
from Dan de Beersheva. So a pretty tiny space east to west from the Sea of Galilee to the Mediterranean,
34:50
about 25, 30 miles, something like that. So you're talking about a narrow corridor of land. There's
34:57
not enough room in that land for every story to have its own place. And so the reality is
35:05
stories build up on a place just like the limestone layers of that land do. And sometimes Jesus goes
35:14
to a place to say something, to do something that is built on what had happened there before.
35:22
And I can give you an example, but let that settle for just a moment. Think about the smallness of that
35:28
land, the vertical building of stories, and how going to one place puts you into the context
35:34
of other earlier stories. Well, now you got me chomping at the bit. I want the example. Let's do it.
35:39
Luke 7. Jesus is where we usually see him at the start of this. He's on the northwest shore of the
35:47
Sea of Galilee. And if we were to put pin in a map every time we know where Jesus is, almost all
35:55
of them would be up there on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. So when he leaves that space,
36:00
it gets my attention as a Bible geographer, because I'm asking, well, what is he going out
36:05
to do? What is the purpose of this field study we're on? Well, in Luke 7, he leaves where we
36:11
typically see him, northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, and walks a full day south to name. And
36:17
we think we know why he's come. Well, when we observe that a funeral procession is leaving the
36:23
town gate, a widow is bearing her only son, taking him out to the cemetery. Jesus stops that funeral
36:34
procession, mid grief, and speaks to the young man as if he had overslept. Young man, I say to you,
36:42
get up. And he does, which is amazing, right? I don't want to lose track of that moment.
36:49
And if I'm telling that story, it would be a good place to do the mic drop, wouldn't it? I mean,
36:56
how do you top the fact that he's just brought someone back from the dead? But as a Bible
37:02
geographer, I'm thinking, well, he's done this before he did this up in Capernaum. He's going
37:07
to do it down in Bethany. So what is there about raising the dead at name that's different than
37:14
about those other places? Well, Luke goes on because he isn't done telling the story. When the young
37:22
man gets up off that palate and return to his mother, Luke gives the reaction of the crowd.
37:29
They say, a great prophet has risen among us. God has come to save or to help his people.
37:40
Now, the language he's come to save or help his people is actually the Hebrew word,
37:47
Elisha, Elisha. And suddenly, my mind goes rolling back into the Old Testament. I'm going,
37:55
wait a minute, is there a story about Elisha and name that I've missed before? And name is not
38:01
mentioned in the Old Testament. But I'm not ready to give up quite yet. And so I look at the little
38:06
bit broader context. Name is on the north side of a mountain called Mount Moray. And if I walk
38:15
just over the ridge from name south, I'm going to come to another small town. It only takes me 15
38:24
minutes to walk there. I'm going to leave name and I'm going to walk south and come to the town
38:29
of Shunam. And good heavens, there's a Shunam story that got knit into this mountainside. Elisha
38:38
raised a young man from the dead and returned him to his mother. Look at what that means.
38:44
Jesus goes to that same mountain, does essentially the same miracle that Elisha had done,
38:53
and he gets the intended response. A great prophet has risen among us. Now, Jesus could have said
39:01
that himself anywhere. And it would have been true, and I would have harvested the value out of it.
39:07
But think of this. He goes to a place where he does a miracle, where he doesn't say it,
39:12
but the people say it. They make the connection. They become the teachers who, through the place,
39:19
remind me that Jesus is the greatest prophet that we have in the Bible, in the spirit of Elisha.
39:28
And it's all because he chose to do that miracle in that place that that teaching comes to life.
39:35
Spectacular, guys, if you need a commercial for the Holy Land docu series,
39:40
basically the stories that you're telling here is indicative of the types of content. And so
39:45
it's shot so beautifully, and it's done so well. So definitely go and check that out, guys. It's
39:49
in the show notes. But also, I just asked you about the most surprising or shocking thing.
39:55
But at some point, in all your hundreds of trips and however many miles you've walked,
40:01
you've had to have a disappointing moment too. So as you're going through, maybe you built something
40:06
up in your brain, and you get there, and it's kind of like, man, or you had some experience as you
40:11
were doing your research where you're just like, yeah, that wasn't quite what I was expecting.
40:15
So yeah, I think it's, I think it's just a geographer in me. It's the lover of the natural
40:25
world that has a challenge with city. So I would think, Oh, Jerusalem really important. Go do the
40:32
Jerusalem stuff. But there's a couple of things about Jerusalem that always make me feel
40:38
less excited to be the outdoor educator there. One is it's a big urban environment full of smog
40:45
and buses and noise. And it doesn't feel like the Jerusalem at all of Bible times. The Jerusalem
40:53
of Bible times is like 1/100 the size of modern Jerusalem. And so it's finding old Jerusalem in
41:02
the midst of the modern Jerusalem, and it's fighting my way through the urban sprawl and the noise.
41:07
And then the places have all been highly modified. So I can get to those places and I can help people
41:14
see here's an event place connection, but I almost always have to rebuild the view. Whereas if I
41:22
go out in rural context, and I'm looking at the Jezreel Valley, or if I'm up at Mount Herman unpacking
41:28
the nature of that 9,232 foot snowclad mountain, I have to do a whole lot less work. First of all,
41:36
I'm in my natural environment. I'm an outdoorsman who's just bacon in the love of what I'm seeing
41:42
there. But I also don't have to change the view like I do when I'm in the urban sprawl of Jerusalem.
41:47
So I'm not sure I would say I'm disappointed in it. It's just like, I'm always a little happy
41:54
when I have a chance to leave Jerusalem and get out into the countryside and teach.
41:58
Well, you strike me as an incredibly optimistic person. So I'm not surprised that you were uncomfortable
42:03
with being the just even just the thought of being disappointed. But I just have been thoroughly
42:07
impressed. And I've really enjoyed our conversation up to this point. But we'll make this the last
42:11
question of the day. There's got to be a place you haven't been able to explore yet. And there's
42:17
just got to be that play or we'll even say it's a Mount Rushmore of places. Maybe it's a handful
42:22
three to four of places you just haven't been able to get to yet. You haven't been able to put your
42:27
hiking boots on that ground yet. If you could go anywhere, if you had a magic ticket and you would
42:32
be safe and yet full access, where would you want to go? Yeah. So I mean, there are places
42:38
because of security concerns that become more challenging to get to the Jordan River,
42:42
ironically, is one of them. Now, fortunately, more recently, what's called the baptism,
42:49
a slight cassowal yuhud has been opened. And so I've been able to get down to the Jordan River
42:55
itself in the last years and ways that I that I hadn't before. But that's another space because
43:01
it's an international boundary. There's so many restrictions in terms of access. I just wish I
43:08
could hang out there a bit more and explore that riparian environment because it is a very,
43:14
very unique ecosystem compared to other places. Okay, very good. Well, hopefully someday we're
43:20
able to make that happen. You'll be able to kind of figure out your way to get there. But
43:24
we've went in and out of a lot of different subject matters here. And it's been absolutely
43:28
a ton of fun being able to talk to you. But that's all for me. Is there anything else you want to get
43:31
off your chest? Now, Kyle, I just appreciate the chance to be be with you and share this. It's
43:37
something I feel really passionate about. Let me share this one last thing that I that I think will
43:43
will maybe move someone off the chair if I haven't moved them already. I taught undergraduates
43:49
Greek and Hebrew for 16 years in the classroom. And it took me a full three semesters to get them
43:58
to the point where they said, Oh, now I'm really excited because I'm seeing something
44:03
in this story in this piece of poetry I had never seen before. And then they were unpacking it
44:08
linguistically. When I take folks to Israel on in whether they're graduate students or church
44:16
groups. And I've seen the same reaction to the book and to the film in just a short amount of time.
44:24
Maybe a handful of hours in that space. People go, that has completely changed what I'm seeing
44:31
in my Bible. My antenna is up for a whole new new adventure. I didn't realize how much geography
44:39
there was in my Bible and how much of the Bible's content I was missing because I wasn't paying
44:44
attention to it. If if if others can see that this is a gateway, this is a gateway into a new way of
44:52
reading the Bible that is highly accessible to them. Let me offer that as an invitation to come on
44:59
the adventure with me. Very, very good. Well, guys, I just I've been thrilled with the things you've
45:04
been able to say you are a spectacular storyteller. So I want to give you that your compliment on
45:08
the way out here. But Mr. Beck, I appreciate you coming on. Hopefully we'll talk again soon.
45:12
Sounds great, Kyle. Thanks for the chance to visit. There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed my time
45:17
with John Beck before we let you go. We're going to do a quick resilience boost at Undaunted Life
45:20
or Mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that forges spiritual mental and
45:24
physical resilience. So I've got two links for you. I've got a link to the YouTube docu series,
45:28
the Holy Land. So you can check that out there. And also a link to Amazon where you can buy our
45:32
daily bread Bible Atlas. Guys, go check it out. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Wherever
45:37
you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five star review.
45:41
If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, shoot me an email to info
45:45
at undonton.life. That's I N F O at undonton.life. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook
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and check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content like
45:54
this coming your way. Just go to www dot undonton.life. And as always, we want to thank the band Holy Name
45:59
for allowing us to use their music for our content. The music on this podcast is their song Perpetua,
46:04
which is off their self titled debut album on Face Down Records. The links are in the description.
46:08
I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual,
46:15
mental and physical resilience. Keep seeking the lion of Judah.
46:45
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