Mm-hmm.

And so sometimes I think we're not actually taking the wickedness of humans, and I mean, like, when they're working together to create new types of ways of grinding people into the bone, uh, to the bone.

Um, I don't think we're taking Jesus seriously enough, uh, about some of this stuff.

Um, and again, a lot of it is because, you know, the worst corruption and evil we've seen is on a micro scale, you know, like two girls that, you know, um, are complicit in killing their mother for no other reason than they just wanna know what it was like to kill.

You're like, "That's horrible." Um, but that's not the kind of thing only that I think Jesus is worried about, that the prophets are worried about, that the Torah is worried about, um, the Torah of Moses.

So, you know, I do...

And again, I, I both want us to be troubled by the violence in scripture and say, like, "Yeah, this is kind of disturbing," but I also want to say, like, it's not for nothing that you see this violence on display.

Mm-hmm.

you bleed it all out? It's an extra rare steak.

Yeah.

You get degrees, right? Yeah.

But even things, I think one of the things that happens, and I will say there's some influence of Jewish midrashic interpretation of law going on here as well, which remember when we're talking about Jewish interpretation of law, We are already talking about a Greco-Roman Hellenistic Jewish understanding of law.

Right.

So we're not talking about an Iron Age understanding of law.

And so they really are already appropriating in some ways and developing their own views of legal frameworks where you do break or keep.

Let me stop there because I'm answering my own question.

The, you know, the audio button on the YouVersion became that for us in some ways that was helpful.

You know, the evidence of this for me, I wanted to write an article, but I decided I was too angry to write it.

When COVID happened, the most disappointing thing to me was that churches, instead of just saying, hey, we've equipped you families over the years.

You know how to read scripture.

You know, do this at home.

We'll be back together whenever, you know, I'm not talking about the politics of meeting together or anything like that.

Instantly flipped over into like, how can we bring the worship service into your living room, right? Because we are the ones who are, and there was, it was really just like, this is where biblical literacy and fluency counts.

Yeah.

Which I later

had to get covered up in order to join the military because it was considered a gang tattoo.

Yeah.

Which at the time I thought was so unjust.

And then when I went into boot camp, I was like, oh, thank God I didn't have that on me.

Like it all made sense once I got to boot camp.

I was like, yeah, you don't want a big skinhead tattoo straight across your back.

So, Drew, one of the things that you have spoken or write about often is trying to understand and get a cultural temperature read on biblical literacy and how is the church, how are Christians engaged with the Bible? What have you found over the past couple of years, as far as the American landscape, at least, about our engagement with the scriptures?