Compiled from Naked Bible Podcast episode 421, the penultimate installment of the "Paul's Use of the Old Testament" series — a conversation between hosts Trey Strickland and Dr. Michael Heiser with guest Dr. Matt Halstead. The episode focuses on how Paul reconfigures the concept of election christologically in Romans 9–11, with extended treatment of the Hosea quotation problem at Romans 9:24–26, the Jacob/Esau narrative, the hardening of Pharaoh, and the olive tree metaphor of Romans 11. Opening remarks have been trimmed. Content is organized topically.
Halstead situates this episode as the final installment in a series of "reconfigurements" — the same verb applied in prior episodes to faith language (episodes on Romans 1–3), the Abraham story (Romans 4), and the Malachi categories (episode 418). In Romans 9–11, the concept reconfigured is election itself. Paul argues that who counts as "elected" — as part of the covenant people of God — is now defined not by ethnic descent from Abraham, not by Torah observance, but by inclusion in Christ. Halstead's thesis: this is not a Pauline novelty but a christological application of a reconfiguration logic already authorized by the Old Testament story, and specifically by Israel's own election narrative.
Halstead opens with the passage he treats as the most revealing test case in the chapter. Paul writes in Romans 9:24–26:
Even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles — as indeed he says in Hosea, "Those who were not my people I will call my people, and her who was not beloved I will call beloved. And in the very place where it was said to them, You are not my people, there they will be called sons of the living God."
The conundrum is explicit: in the original context of Hosea 1–2, this prophecy is addressed to the rebellious northern tribes of Israel, not to Gentiles. Hosea is prophesying that wayward Israel will be re-included in the covenant after her unfaithfulness. Paul applies the same text to argue for the first-time inclusion of Gentiles who have never been in the covenant at all. The original referent and Paul's applied referent are different populations. Scholars have been divided on what to do with this for generations, and Halstead is candid that there is no consensus.
Halstead surveys five positions taken by scholars, with his assessment of each.
View 1: Paul unilaterally imposes his own assumptions. On this reading, Paul is simply making the text mean what he needs it to mean — a textual relativist, in effect. A slightly softer version holds that Paul approaches Hosea with a "new covenant awareness" that licenses new meaning. Halstead's objection: even this softer form fails to account for the way Paul actually uses the text. Paul is not reading his new covenant awareness into Hosea; he is arguing from Hosea as though the text supplies the basis for his claim. A text cannot simultaneously be the foundation of an argument and an imposition onto a blank page. Those two moves are incompatible.
View 2: Hosea originally meant to include Gentiles. If Hosea's prophecy already anticipated Gentile inclusion, there is no problem with Paul applying it that way. Halstead's objection: this is nearly impossible to substantiate. Hosea's text says what it says — Israel's wayward tribes — and speculating about what Hosea "might have been thinking" beyond that is the same methodological error already named in the series: making the original context conform to what a later reader needs, rather than letting the text speak on its own terms.
View 3: Paul is using Hosea the same way Hosea used it — of Jews, not Gentiles. This position dissolves the problem by reading Paul's quotation as referring to Jewish re-inclusion rather than Gentile first-time inclusion. Halstead's objection: grammatically implausible given Romans 9:24 and the immediate context, where Paul distinguishes those called "not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles" before introducing the Hosea quotation. Furthermore, just a few verses later Paul quotes Isaiah to make the case specifically for Jewish inclusion — which implies Hosea was doing something different.
View 4: Paul simply chose the wrong passage. The scholar C. H. Dodd, among others, has suggested Paul should have used this Hosea quotation in Romans 11 (where he does argue for Jewish re-inclusion), not Romans 9. Paul made a mistake. Halstead's objection: implausible on its face. Paul is a careful and meticulous reader of scripture throughout Romans; the supposed blunder is one modern scholars have supposedly spotted but Paul himself, writing in closest possible proximity to the text and to Romans 11, apparently failed to notice. No text-critical evidence supports a scribal error either.
View 5: Paul is "principalizing" — drawing a general principle. Just as God can re-include wayward Jews (Hosea's point), so he can also include Gentiles (a derived principle). Halstead finds partial merit here but identifies a fatal weakness: a principle is not an argument. If Paul is only saying "because God can call Gentiles, therefore he is calling them," the logic fails. The possibility of an action does not entail the actuality of it. Paul needs more than a principle to carry the argumentative weight his rhetoric requires.
Halstead's conclusion: none of the five views fully accounts for both what Paul does with Hosea's original context and the way Paul employs the text as the basis of a genuine argument. The need is for a hermeneutic flexible enough to allow Paul to go beyond Hosea's original meaning without turning him into a relativist — and stable enough to explain why Paul can legitimately argue from a text he is also reading through christological assumptions. His answer is the storied approach developed across the series: in Christ, Gentile believers have become Israel — part of the elect entity Hosea's prophecy was always about — so the text applies to them not because its original referent was changed but because their status has been.
Before developing his argument, Paul opens Romans 9 with a statement of genuine anguish about ethnic Israel and an enumeration of her privileges: the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs — and supremely, the Messiah himself, who came according to the flesh from their lineage. Halstead notes this is important context: Paul's argument that election has been reconfigured around Christ is not an anti-Israel argument. He is a Jew writing with unceasing anguish about his own people's failure to recognize the Messiah.
Paul's argument from Romans 9:6 onward is a retelling of Israel's own founding story that is designed to show election was never based on natural descent or human effort. He works through two episodes: Isaac's birth from Abraham and Sarah (an impossible birth, dependent entirely on divine promise) and the selection of Jacob over Esau (the younger over the elder, chosen before either had done anything good or bad).
Halstead's reading of the Jacob/Esau episode follows the same national-corporate line developed in the Malachi episode (418): Jacob and Esau represent Israel and Edom as peoples, not as individuals, and the "hatred" of Esau is covenantal/vocational — a choosing of one nation's vocation over another's — not a declaration of personal eternal reprobation. The hyperbole parallels Jesus's "if anyone does not hate his father and mother" in Luke 14:26: purposeful exaggeration to make a point about priority, not literal emotional hatred.
The underlying argument Paul is building: Israel the nation, like Jacob the individual, was the runt — chosen not by virtue of privilege, lineage, or merit, but purely by grace. If Israel cannot boast over her election (she was nothing when God called her), she has no standing to boast over Gentiles who are now being called by the same grace.
Paul's discussion of Pharaoh's hardening and the potter-and-clay image is treated by Halstead as emphatically about vocational election, not individual eternal predestination. Several observations:
On hardening: Paul's own earlier theology in Romans 1 supplies the interpretive key. God "gave them up" (Romans 1:24, 26, 28) to the desires of their own hearts — hardening, in Romans' own framework, is God's response to ongoing, willful rebellion, a divine confirmation of a choice already being made rather than a unilateral imposition overriding human agency. Pharaoh was already the man he was; God knew it and used him accordingly.
On the potter image: Halstead directs readers back to Jeremiah 18, the source of the imagery. In Jeremiah's own context, the potter's shaping of the clay is explicitly conditional — if a nation repents, I will relent — which works against a deterministic reading. The potter metaphor in its Old Testament context is about God's sovereign freedom to respond to human action, not about unilateral shaping without regard to it.
On the temporal scope of hardening: Romans 11 makes clear that Israel's hardening is temporary, not eternal. Those who are hardened can still be saved. The concept of eternal reprobation — a permanent divine exclusion of individuals — does not appear in Paul's text; it is imported from later theological systems.
Paul quotes Isaiah 8:14 and 28:16 together — a stone of stumbling in Zion, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame — and applies them christologically to Jesus. The structure of the argument: Gentiles who did not pursue covenant status by Torah have attained righteousness because they pursued it by faith (in Christ). Israel, who did pursue Torah, stumbled over the stone — over Christ — because she sought covenant status as though it were based on works rather than faith.
The section closes with Romans 10:4: Christ is the telos of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. Halstead reads τέλος as "culmination" — the goal toward which the law was always pointing — not "termination" or abolition. Christ does not end the law; he brings it to its intended destination.
The practical implication for the Hosea problem: Gentiles who believe in Christ are doing exactly what the patriarchs did — believing in Yahweh and what Yahweh has done. It would be inconsistent to include Abraham (who had no Torah) and exclude Gentile believers who share Abraham's posture of faith oriented toward the same God, now revealed in the Messiah.
Halstead turns briefly to Romans 11 to show how Paul resolves the paradox his argument in Romans 9–10 generates. The sequence:
Israel's hardening — her refusal to believe in the Messiah — has paradoxically brought Gentiles into the covenant (Romans 11:11–12). These Gentile believers, now "grafted in" to the olive tree whose root is the Abrahamic covenant, become a provocation to ethnic Israel. Seeing Gentiles in possession of Israel's covenant blessings, Israel is driven to jealousy, which in Paul's expectation leads to Israel's own eventual faith in Christ and re-inclusion (Romans 11:26).
The result is a double fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise: Israel is both blessed (rescued from her own failure through the Messiah) and a blessing (her very disobedience becomes the occasion for Gentile inclusion, which in turn brings Israel back). The olive tree metaphor holds three entities in tension: ethnic Israel currently hardened, Gentile believers grafted in, and ethnic Israel to be re-grafted. Halstead is careful not to press the metaphor further than Paul intends it, but the structural point is clear: the concept of "Israel" has been opened without being abandoned, and the Abrahamic covenant is finally being enacted rather than merely promised.
Heiser adds a note of caution to Gentile readers: Paul explicitly warns the grafted-in branches not to boast over the natural ones. The same logic that humbled Israel — she was elected by grace, not by virtue — applies equally to Gentile believers. The same grace that included them can set them aside. Christology, not ethnicity and not prior religious heritage, is the axis on which everything in Romans 9–11 rotates.
Closing the episode, Halstead offers the summary formulation that governs the entire argument: Paul's Christ is the axis upon which the covenant promises rotate. Election, covenant membership, righteousness, Torah-fulfillment — all of these concepts are reconfigured around Christ. This reconfiguration is not Paul's invention; it is the culmination of a trajectory that runs from the Abrahamic promise through the Davidic covenant through the servant songs of Isaiah through Malachi's messenger of the covenant, all of which the prior episodes in the series have documented. Paul, writing after the Damascus christophany, identifies the Messiah as the point at which every line of that converging trajectory arrives — and draws the consequences for what it means to be the people of God.