This is the Bama podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we hear the critique of the Pharisees who want to write off Jesus' ministry as a work of evil.

We also see Jesus' field their request for a sign. Absolutely. We were long last time. Let's see how short we can make this. Don't get your hopes up everybody. That still won't be short.

Let's just dive right in. Turns out there's a lot to say about Jesus. It's a great way to put it. And I'm trying to get session three in less than a hundred episodes.

Oh, I'm here for the long haul. Whatever you want to do. Well, let's dive right in and just pick up where we left off last week. How about that?

All right, Matthew 12, verse 22, then they brought him a demon possessed man who was blind and mute in Jesus healed him so that he could both talk and see all the people were astonished and said, could this be the son of David?

But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, it is only by a beelzeable, the Prince of demons that this fellow drives out demons.

All right. So let's deal with this whole beelzeable thing. For instance, a whole bunch of questions. This is kind of deal with that. What are the Pharisees saying? And why do they use the term beelzeable?

First, we just know where beelzeable comes from. So beelzeable is a reference back to the old testament. There's actually a reference in the Old Testament. And we're going to link Brent and the show notes we found the Wikipedia article.

I really liked it was a very concise rendering of beelzeable. There's a lot of modern uses, the uses of beelzeable Christian literature loves to talk about beelzeable being Satan.

It's not that that's necessarily a bad connection or incorrect, but it's definitely not Jewish. It's not going to help us here. So there's a reference to beelzeable in the Old Testament, which literally means, and there's a there's a debate here. It means one of two things.

It's it's a reference from the Hebrew, but all, or we talk about beel, that ancient pagan God, beel in all of its different forms.

Beel and then Zabub or Zabub, one of the two. If it's Zabub, it literally means by L, which means Lord and Zabub means flies. So Lord of the flies is where that term comes from.

Now there's a big rabbinical debate is where to they're not rabbinical debates. Excuse me. There's a scholastic historical debate over where that's coming from. A lot of scholars say that in the land of Phyllisja, with the Phyllisdeans, very prominent people group in the Old Testament.

We talk about the beels a lot, and a lot of times I've talked about beels from which country, not not Phyllisja, but which one Brent?

A Syria not quite, but it is north. It's on the coast north on the coast.

Paired up with Solomon and he had an omrie, the land of the Pho.

Phoenicians maybe, yeah, I can get it when you give me almost the whole thing.

So the Phoenicians are the coastal people from the north and the Philistines

are the coastal people from the south. Now usually when we talk about

bail worship, we talk about Phoenicia because they had the most evolved,

the most advanced, the most prominent, especially in the Old Testament story

with the idolatry of Israel. They were the ones that you're usually dealing with.

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