This book has started a journey for me that continues to change how I read the Bible. The author's intent is to combat the tendency in the world, specifically in the Church, to create idols out of creation. To do this, he attempts to describe a Biblical view of the world -- how does the Bible describe God and His creation, and what is the Bible telling us about God, about ourselves, about His people, and about the world when it uses the language that it does to tell us God's Story.
I have the publication from 1999, and some of the thoughts are not easy to follow, e.g. the author explains that the ages at death of the descendants of Seth correspond to different periods of time (e.g., days of the year, days of a quarter of a year), signifying that they were rulers. His main point is that these details are given to us for a reason, and within context, we can deduce from what we know about these numbers -- and the people described when these numbers are mentioned -- that an ancient literary technique is being employed to give us a clue about what the Bible was indicating when it included that number. (Enoch was 365 years old when God took him. The Bible did not have to tell us the ages of anyone when they died; in fact, it often doesn't. The fact that a measuring unit of a year's time -- that is relative to the movement of a star in our sky (the sun)-- is also the age of a man of God when he died, is an indication of the status of the man of God as a ruler. Why? Because the Bible has already told us that the greater light was given to "rule" the days and the lesser light was given to "rule" the night, and that the stars were given for times, seasons, etc. The Bible is not evoking superstition about a specific number. There is neither magic in the number 365 because of this verse, nor is there some hint about a specific way that we might observe the sun "ruling". The author is trying to point out that the "language" of the Bible is symbolic. We are being simultaneously given "flat" information that also pulls depth out of previous information which corresponds. In this fashion, the message of the text remains context-specific -- if we've been told that stars are "rulers" of time, then numeric language corresponding to the movement and time measurement of the stars may be a typological message about a person that is a ruler.)
Unfortunately, the author sometimes does his own translations of Hebrew text, or states as fact that an item mentioned in the text is symbolic, without telling us about his research on the subject. I think that, in the interest of brevity, this may be the author's way of leaving it to the reader to research his translations and statements on the reader's own time.
I have listened to an extensive number of his lectures, and I can vouch that he is not making up his theology. With some of his conclusions about dominion and fleshing out God's Kingdom on earth, I disagree. This is still an incredible first step in really letting the Bible "speak" for itself.
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