Let's go ahead and get started. There's a lot to cover, but I want to try to unite a lot of these disparate parts of the Bible, the many small books clustered here at the end that we'll be considering. I'm going to try to unite them by elaborating certain themes as we move through them, but as you can see from this giant chart, there's quite a bit. First, let's begin with the book of Ruth. The book of Ruth is set in the Days of the Judges. That's the opening line of the book. It tells you that this happened in the Days of the Judges, but it was certainly written later. Whether it was post-exilic or pre-exilic is not certain, so we're going to be asking the questions of a canonical critic. Whatever its origin, how did this book function for Second Temple Jews? As the story of a foreign woman whose foreign status is continually emphasized throughout the book, Ruth the Moabite, Ruth the Moabite test. As a foreign woman who acts nobly and enters the community of Israel by choice, this story would have stood in opposition to the negative view of foreigners, the ban on intermarriage, and the purely genealogical definition of Israelite identity that was promulgated by Ezra and Nehemiah in the post-exilic period. In the story you have a famine in Judah and that causes a Bethlehemite man, Eli Melch, and his wife, Naomi, and their two children, to leave Judah. They're going to reside in the country of Moab, where the Israelites live. And their two sons marry Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. You have to consider the effect that these opening verses would have had on an ancient Israelite listener or reader. Moab was a hostile neighbor on Israel's southeastern border, and the Moabites were hated for their ill treatment of the Israelites when they were traveling to the Promised Land. Their lack of hospitality had already led to a prohibition of intermarriage in the Torah itself. The Moabites and the Ammonites are two foreign groups that are explicitly prohibited from entering the congregation in Deuteronomy 23. And the Israelites' low opinion of the Moabites is also expressed in Genesis in the very degrading story of Moab's descent from the incestuous relationship between Lot and one of his daughters after the fall of Sodom. And yet here we read in the opening lines of this story a man from Bethlehem who travels to Moab and his two women. And then in short order, Eli Melch and his two sons, who are appropriately named sickness and death, by the way, in Hebrew, they die. And the Israelite widow Naomi is left now with no blood relation, no blood-male relation, only her two Moabite daughters-in-law. And Naomi weepily tells the girls that they should return to their father's home. She's poor. She'll never be able to support them as a poor widow. She has no further sons to give to them, and clearly they have no legal or moral obligation or tie to Naomi. And we'll pick up the story then in chapter 1, verse 11.  Have I any more sons in my body who might be husbands for you? Turn back, my daughters, for I am too old to be married. And even if I thought there was hope for me, even if I'm married tonight and I also bore sons, should you wait for them to grow up? Should you on their account debar yourselves from marriage? Oh no, my daughters. My lot is far more bitter than yours, for the hand of the Lord has struck out against me. They broke into weeping again, and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law farewell. But Ruth clung to her. So she said, See, your sister-in-law has returned to her people and her gods. Go follow your sister-in-law. But Ruth replied, Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge.   And there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord, due to me, if even death, parts me from you. And when Naomi saw how determined she was to go with her, she ceased to argue with her. And the two went on until they reached Bethlehem. All of the names in this story are wonderfully symbolic. Sickness and death, they walk on the stage with a big sign saying, I'm in a bit part and I'm ready to die. Orpah's name means the back of the neck, because she turns her back on her mother-in-law as well. That's a wonderful story with lots of named symbolisms. But by the force of sheer conviction, Ruth joins herself to the people of her mother-in-law. And back in Judah, Ruth supports her mother-in-law and herself by gleaning the fallen sheaves behind the reapers in the field, because according to the Pentateuch, the sheaves that fall behind the reapers must be left for the poor to collect, who don't go back and collect them. So Ruth gleans, and she gleans in the field of a kinsman named Boaz. He's a man of, he's described as a man of substance, and she's very diligent and she soon comes to his attention. And he's very kind for her. He looks out for her safety among the rough field workers. He provides water for her. He's heard of what Ruth has done for Naomi, how she left her home and left her family to come to a people that she really didn't know, and he blesses her. He says, May the Lord reward your deeds. May you have a full recompense from the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have refuge, chapter 2, verse 12. And he increases his generosity. He shares his meal with Ruth and gives her from the heaps of grain in addition to the gleaning that she's collecting. So Naomi is very delighted with Ruth's gleaning. They're more than suffice for their needs, but she's even more learned to please that Ruth seems to have found favor in the eyes of Boaz. He's being very kind and generous. And she points out, you know, he is among our redeeming kinsmen. The term here, the Hebrew term is goel. Goel means redeemer. In fact, in a lot of the Christian language later, this is the word they're using when they talk about my redeemer, levith. It's simply this word, goel. And the goel is a person who, as the nearest relative or as a close relative, has certain legal obligations to another person. And those obligations, the primary obligations are three, to redeem the person or their property if they've been sold to a stranger due to poverty. You have to redeem them from debt servitude, essentially. So your goel should do that for you. To marry a childless widow, right? So if a man dies and his wife is childless, the goel is supposed to marry her, provide seed, and the firstborn son will be named after the man who is dead. So he's supposed to marry a childless widow and produce offspring for the deceased. Usually that falls first to the brother. And then in the case of the blood redeemer, also the redeemer is supposed to avenge the blood of a kinsman. If you're killed, your redeemer is supposed to seek vengeance for you. Boaz is a somewhat distant relative, but Naomi believes he's the answer to their dual problem of poverty on the one hand and Ruth's widowhood on the other hand. So in Chapter 3 she urges Ruth to make a visit to Boaz. He's winnowing barley on the threshing floor, and Ruth is supposed to bathe herself, anoint herself, dress up, and go out at night to the threshing floor. You should know that in biblically threshing floors tend to be places of revelry at the end of the harvest time, and they are often frequented by prostitutes. But Naomi seems to be planning Ruth's seduction of Boaz. She instructs Ruth not to reveal herself until Boaz has finished eating and drinking, and when he lies down, Ruth is to approach him and uncover his feet.  So Ruth follows these instructions exactly in Chapter 3, verses 7 to 11. Boaz ate and drank and in a cheerful mood went to lie down beside the grain pile, and then she went over stealthily and uncovered his feet and lay down. In the middle of the night the man gave a start and pulled back.  Who are you? he asked. And she replied, I am your handmade Ruth.  Be exclaimed, be blessed of the Lord, daughter. Your latest deed of loyalty is greater than the first, in that you have not turned to younger men, whether poor or rich. And now, daughter, have no fear.  So Ruth's request is that Boaz act as her redeemer and spread his robe over her, which is a formal act of protection and espousal. Boaz assures her that he will redeem her. He then goes on to point out, however, that there is another kinsman who is actually a closer relation, and therefore has the first right of refusal. And Boaz will settle the matter legally in the morning, and we are left wondering what transpired in the night. In Chapter 4 we read the legal proceeding by which the other kinsman is freed of his obligation and his claim to marry her. And this then clears away, enables Boaz to marry her. But the punchline to the whole story is yet to come, and that occurs in Chapter 4, Verses 13-17. So Boaz married Ruth. She became his wife, and he cohabited with her. And the Lord let her conceive, and she bore a son. And the women said to Naomi, Blessed be the Lord who has not withheld a redeemer from you today. May his name be perpetuated in Israel.  And Naomi took the child and held it to her bosom. She became its foster mother, and the women-neighbors gave him a name saying, A son is born to Naomi. They named him Oved. He was the father of Jesse, father of David. So David, God's anointed king over Israel. David, with whom God covenanted that his house should reign forever. David, from whose line would come the messianic king to the final age, and this David is said to be the direct descendant, the great grandson of a foreign woman from a country of idol worshipers and a Moabitess, no less. So it seems that this very short and very moving story represents a strand of thought that stood in opposition to the line of thinking found, for example, in Ezra's call for a ban on intermarriage as the only means of ensuring faithfulness to Israel's God. Not only is Ruth the Moabitess not guilty of abominable practices, she's the ancestral of Yahweh's chosen monarch, and she's praised in the story by all who know her as a Paragon of Chesed, this quality of steadfast love and covenantal loyalty that binds the members of the covenant community to one another and to God. Ruth the Moabitess stood by an elderly widow to whom she had no real legal obligation, and she was put into the covenant community. The acceptance of foreigners is well documented in post-exilic Judaism, despite Ezra's polemical efforts to exclude foreigners from the community. It's important to remember that Ezra's reforms never became normative for the entire community. Post-exilic and later rabbinic Judaism never adopted the purely genealogical definition of Jewish identity. They allowed for the phenomenon of conversion and marriage into the covenant by persons of foreign birth who accepted the God of Israel, a possibility that Ezra completely forecloses. Ezra's extreme views were popular among sectarian groups. So Ezra in exclusivism is championed, for example, in writings that are found at Qumran. It exerted some influence on early Christian bands on marriage, absolute bands on marriage between believers and unbelievers. But it's a book of Ruth that features prominently in the Jewish conversion ceremony to this day. You have a different kind of acceptance of foreigners that's voiced by prophets of the Restoration period. So these are prophets of the fifth century and we'll look late sixth and fifth century. We're going to look now briefly at some of the last prophetic books. These are writings that date to the time of the first generations of returned exiles and on. Earlier prophets in the pre-exilic period, the classical prophets we've already looked at, they had spoken of a remnant that would be restored and would be restored gloriously to its land. But the returned exiles faced a life of great hardship, the reality of poverty and the difficulties in rebuilding the temple and the hostility of the Judeans who had remained behind, as well as the hostility of the surrounding peoples, the absence of any real political independence under a Davidic king. All of these things fell far short of the early prophets' glorious descriptions of this restored remnant. So new prophets in the period of the Restoration have to address the community's disappointment. The short book of Haggai contains the words of the prophet Haggai, spoken primarily to Zerubavel. Zerubavel is the governor of Judea, and Haggai prophesies that the temple will be built around 520. And he declares that all of the difficulties the community was facing, the agricultural setbacks and the famines, these were all signs of God's displeasure that the temple hadn't been completed. And Zerubavel is convinced by this. The people return to their task enthusiastically, and as we know the temple is rebuilt, as Haggai promised. He says it's a humble structure, but soon it's going to be filled with treasures flowing in from all nations. And this is the restoration that were made by the prophets of old or just around the corner. So Haggai longed for a rebuilt temple, but not only that, also for the re-establishment of Judah's independence under a Davidic king. And he held out hope for Zerubavel, the governor, who was, after all, a descendant of David, through the last king that went into exile. He hoped that he would serve as God's messiah or appointed king. But his hope is even stronger in the work of Haggai's contemporary, the prophet Zechariah. Zechariah is fourteen chapters long. The first eight chapters contain the prophecies of the historical Zechariah, around 520 or so. The last chapters, chapters 9 through 14, this is known as Second Zechariah. These chapters contain obscure writings from a later hand, and they are of a very different type or genre. They are written in the apocalyptic vein. So we won't talk about those now. We'll consider those momentarily. I'm going to be talking about apocalyptic for the last half of the lecture. So for right now, I'm interested, however, in the first eight chapters, which represent the oracles of the historical prophet Zechariah, around 520. He preached and prophesied for about two years. He urges in these chapters the rebuilding of the temple. The first six chapters contain a series of elaborate and symbolic visions, eight different visions, that are revealed by an angel or a divine messenger. That's a mode of revelation that's going to be standard in apocalyptic literature, as we'll soon see. Earlier prophets received a word or a vision, but as we move towards apocalyptic literature and later literature, prophets often receive messages from God through an angel or a messenger. These visions focus hope on Zarubavel, the governor, and on the priest Joshua, the high priest Joshua. The idea is that they'll rule in a kind of diarchy as monarch and priest. At some point, however, it seems that the Persians got rid of Zarubavel. He was ousted, perhaps because Messianic hope was starting to gather around Zarubavel. So Zechariah's prophecies seem to be adjusted to refer Joshua. Although they originally referred to Zarubavel, and although Chapter 6 in particular seems to refer originally to Zarubavel, it is altered so that it now depicts Joshua as a chute or a branch from Jesse's stock, Jesse's stock, meaning a Davidite. David's father was Jesse, so to say a root from Jesse's stock as to say a Davidite. It says that Joshua will rebuild the sanctuary. He will wear the royal insignia, although he is the priest. The elevation, however, of the high priest is a feature of the post-exilic period. It's a feature of Judah in the post-exilic period, high priest coming to take some of the trappings of royal office. Chapters 7 and 8 declare God's promise to turn and to do good things in Jerusalem and the house of Judah, so long as the people will turn from their unjust and evil ways. Zechariah points forward to the glorious day when all the nations of the world will eagerly come to seek the Lord in Jerusalem and to entreat his favor. So we read in Zechariah 8.23, Thus said the Lord of hosts, In those days ten men from nations of every tongue will take hold, they will take hold of every Jew by a corner of his cloak, and say, Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you. In this restoration period you can see features prophets who envisions other nations joining Israel in the worship of Yahweh. They will come to rally around and join Israel in the worship of God in Jerusalem. The last wave of prophetic writings that we have addresses the disappointment and the disillusionment of the late 6th and 5th century Judeans. What was the message of these writings? The basic message was that the earlier prophets, their promises of future glory for the restored remnant, these were all true. The future just isn't now. It's only going to happen in the Eschaton, the final day. Only then will the glory of Jerusalem and a messianic ruler be restored, and the hope that has to sustain the community through the bleak present is a hope for an eschatological hope, a hope that focuses on an ideal account of the end, eschatology and account of the end, because in the end of days everything will be set right. So as we move later into the period we find increasingly the hope for the community is thrust off into the future in an eschatology. Parts of 3rd Isaiah depict the bitter reality of life in the exilic Judah and advance in eschatology. You remember the book of Isaiah, which is 66 chapters. We divide into three parts, one through 39, which is the historical Isaiah. Then we have 2nd Isaiah and then 3rd Isaiah. We're dealing with now. That's chapters 56 to 66. The anonymous prophetic author of these chapters denounces the failings of the exiles, but does hold out an eschatology, a doctrine, a final things that depicts what's going to happen in the end of days. This kind of eschatology differs from the depiction of Zion's future glory that we had in the early classical prophets. The earlier prophetic pronouncements generally referred to a re-establishment of Judah's fortunes in historical time. But eschatological works like 3rd Isaiah look beyond historical time. They're looking to a time of a new heaven and a new earth. When Judah's sins will be forgotten, the land will become an earthly paradise, transformed and blessed with peace and prosperity and length of days. This is from Isaiah 65 verses 17 to 25. For behold, I am creating a new heaven and a new earth. The former things shall not be remembered, they shall never come to mind. Be glad then and rejoice forever in what I am creating, for I shall create Jerusalem as a joy and her people as a delight. Never again shall there be heard there the sounds of weeping and wailing. No more shall there be an infant or graybeard who does not live out his days. He who dies at a hundred years shall be reckoned a youth, and he who fails to reach a hundred shall be reckoned a cursed. For the days of my people shall be as long as the days of the tree. My chosen ones shall outlive the work of their hands. They shall not toil to no purpose. They shall not bear children for terror, but they shall be a people blessed by the Lord, and their offspring shall remain with them. Before they pray, I will answer. They are still speaking, I will respond. The wolf and the lamb shall graze together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and the serpent's food shall be earth, in all my sacred mount.  See, this interesting notion of a completely new, transformed heaven and earth. The lion is vegetarian again. The serpent no longer is, there's not this animosity between the serpent and humans, as was decreed at the end of Genesis with a curse on the serpent. They're going to just be eating earth, and there will be no danger. Third Isaiah also sounds this theme of openness, reassuring foreigners and eunuchs who have joined themselves to Yahweh that they'll be welcome in the Holy Temple to serve God and to offer sacrifices. Now, this is significant. Again, remember that Deuteronomy 23, right in the heart of the Pentateuch, bans eunuchs specifically, and certain foreigners, Moabites, Amonites, from entering the congregation. Remember also that Ezekiel explicitly excluded foreigners from the restored temple and his visions at the end of the book. And this is also clearly the policy of Ezra and Nehemiah. They had an Ammonite who had his lodgings or office or room in the temple. They had him thrown out of that area in the temple. But Third Isaiah seems to oppose such restrictions. Isaiah 56, verses 3 to 7. Let not the foreigner say who has attached himself to the Lord, the Lord will keep me apart from his people. And let not the eunuchs say I am a withered tree. For thus said the Lord, as for the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who have chosen what I desire and hold fast to my covenant, I will give them in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons or daughters. I will give them an everlasting name which shall not perish. As for the foreigners who attach themselves to the Lord, to minister to him and to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it and who hold fast to my covenant, I will bring them to my sacred mount and let them rejoice in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices shall be welcome on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. So on this issue, clearly, the post-exilic community was quite divided. And there's only one biblical book which pretty much in its entirety belongs to a genre of literature known as apocalyptic, not in its entirety, but it is the most significant and thoroughgoing apocalyptic book in the Bible. The term apocalyptic derives from the Greek word apocalypsis. An apocalypsis is a revealing, all right? So something that's apocalyptic is a revealing. Apocalypse is a revelation of things to come. And as apocalypses generally predict the end of historical time in the beginning of a new world order, they are generally concerned with eschatology. So apocalyptic works tend to be eschatological, all right? That doesn't mean all eschatological work is apocalyptic. Apocalyptic literature within the Bible, and then much more significantly outside the Hebrew Bible, is characterized by certain distinguishing features, which I've thrown up in a brief note form over here. So apocalyptic literature is always eschatological. It deals with the end time. But to be apocalyptic, a work has to have certain features, and not all eschatologies have these features. This is what they are. Most apocalyptic writings are pseudonymous. They're generally attributed to important figures of the past, Edoch or Abraham or someone. They tend to also feature a revelation by a heavenly messenger, an angel who comes in a vision or a dream to deliver some sort of message. In general, the message is highly symbolic. It's coded, and often the symbolism is quite bizarre. You'll have surreal images of beasts and monsters, and usually these depict foreign nations. The visions tend to be chronological. They tend to be a systematic chronology of past, present, and future events that represent the march of history in coded form again. And so it tends to require interpretation, and that's usually given by the divine messenger who reveals the symbolic chronological code. Fourthly, apocalypses tend to predict a series of catastrophes. These are signs of the coming of the end, that final point in the march of history that's being laid out. You have motifs from ancient myths very often used to describe these catastrophes. I'll come back to that in a minute. Apocalypses also tend to be what I call morally dualistic. They tend to divide humankind into two mutually exclusive groups. The righteous, which is always a tiny majority, and the wicked, which is always the vast majority. And there's going to be some final public judgment, and the righteous will be saved, and the wicked will be destroyed. In this respect, especially later apocalypses, show the influence of Persian thought. Persian thought is also quite dualist in nature, with oppositions of light and darkness, or good and evil, and light and death, and so on. So there does seem to be some Persian influence, and we're well into the Persian period at this point. Sixth feature is that God generally appears in apocalyptic literature as an enthroned king. He brings all of history to a crashing end and demonstrates his sovereignty. He confounds the wicked. He does all of these things at the same time. He confounds the wicked and establishes himself as a sovereign and enthroned king in control. Seventh apocalyptic literature, as I briefly mentioned before, often incorporates mythological motifs and imagery, especially the motif of a battle between God and primordial chaotic elements. And that will often be the imagery that's used in depicting the final battle with the godless or the wicked. Apocalypses also generally depict a judgment of the individual dead, followed by everlasting life or punishment. So, again, apocalypses develop quite differently outside the writings of the Hebrew Bible. In the Bible we have a few scattered apocalyptic elements and then much of the Book of Daniel. And so we don't see the idea of life after death really in the Hebrew Bible until this very late apocalyptic book of Daniel. The idea is very influential in the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are very dualist and in the writings of the New Testament, of course. So a belief in personal immortality, a belief in a general resurrection of the dead. It can arise from a negative view of this world as a place where justice can be obtained. So apocalyptic writers examined the world they lived in. They drew the conclusion that reward and punishment were going to be made in an afterlife. They were certainly not doled out in this life as Israel suffered. And this is a marked break from the general conviction of the Hebrew Bible that human life is limited to this world, and that the fundamental concern of humans and God is to be in this life and not immortality in another. I think apocalyptic literature can be described as a literature of hope and despair. It's a literature of despair or pessimism because its basic premise is that this world holds out no promise for the righteous. It's a literature of hope or optimism because it affirms that God will intervene. He will intervene in human history. He'll set everything right. He'll interrupt the natural order. He's going to destroy this broken world as we know it. And he'll do so in order to rescue the righteous and humiliate the wicked. And if you've already died, don't worry, there'll be a resurrection. It will all be made right. But this hope for supreme and ultimate vindication is thrust off into the future. So apocalyptic constitutes yet one more response to the traumatic events, the crises, and the disappointments of Israel's history. In a second we'll get to Daniel, but there are a few apocalyptic passages of varying lengths in other post-exilic books. I'll just touch on them very quickly. Second Zechariah and a little bit the Book of Joel, just to prepare us for Daniel. So Second Zechariah, now these are chapters 9 through 14. We talked about the historical Zechariah, chapters 1 through 8. So this is Second Zechariah, chapters 9 through 14. And it's a collection of diverse oracles, probably fifth century or later, that contain these strange visions and predictions. Their meanings cannot always be fathomed, but they seem to focus on the day of the Lord and the restoration of Jerusalem and the rise of a new and humble king who will reign in peace, really over a new world order. Chapter 14 is a vision of this global battle that will bring history to an end. God's going to bring all the nations to Jerusalem where they will plunder the city.  And then at the last moment when things look the most desperate, God will intervene and he'll fight for Israel an exact revenge on her enemies. And it's after this final battle that God will transform the earth into a paradise. So Israel's enemies will rage against one another. The surviving nations will pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Again, Jerusalem now is elevated above all cities and these nations will come to Jerusalem to worship Yahweh at his temple, and Yahweh will be sovereign over the world. Joel, a very short little book, probably the latest prophetic book. It also contains apocalyptic material. The versification of Joel varies tremendously in different English translations. So I'm using the verse markings that are in the Bible you have, but if you consult another Bible, some of them have only three chapters, some have four. It can be confusing. Well, we can divide Joel into two parts, up to chapter 2, verse 27. So that's the first part, from 1.1 to 2.27 or 1.2 really. And that contains a description of a military invasion. It's symbolized by an army of locusts. And this invasion, this army of locusts, is interpreted as a divine punishment that is necessary or that must come before the day of the Lord. The second part of Joel, which begins in verse 28 of chapter 2, is a fully apocalyptic description of the final day of terror. Reading from chapter 3, verses 3 and 4, Before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes, I will set portents in the sky and on earth, blood and fire and pillars of smoke, and the sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. But the righteous are going to survive. This is pointed out in chapter 3, verse 5. But everyone who invokes the name of the Lord shall escape, for there shall be a remnant on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem as the Lord promised. As we move into chapter 4 of Joel, the day of the Lord is envisaged as a judgment day for all peoples. So this is increasingly the view of the Eschaton, a final battle and also a judgment day. And that judgment day will then issue in a new age. This is an idea that the Book of Daniel will elaborate on in a minute, not to mention the apocalyptic writings that are outside of the Hebrew Bible. In this judgment day, God will summon all of the godless nations to the valley of judgment, Jehoshaphat, which means God will judge, so the valley of Jehoshaphat. And here the final battle between good and evil will take place, and after that God's people will be blessed and the holy city will never again suffer shame. For lo, in those days and in that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the valley of Jehoshaphat, and there I will contend with them over my very own people, Israel, which they scattered among the nations. Towards the end then of the book we read, Let the nations rouse themselves and march up to the valley of Jehoshaphat, for there I will sit in judgment over all the nations round about, Swing the sickle for the crop is ripe, Come and tread for the wine presses full, The vats are overflowing for great is their wickedness. But the Lord will be a shelter to his people, a refuge to the children of Israel, And Jerusalem shall be holy, Nevermore shall strangers pass through it, And in that day the mountains shall drip with wine, The hills shall flow with milk, And all the water courses of Judah shall flow with water, A spring shall issue from the house of the Lord, And shall water the wadi of Echesias, And Judah shall be inhabited forever, And Jerusalem throughout the ages. So we see a lot of eschatological features in the book of Joel. You have first of all a series of disasters, a signal, the impending wrath of God. You have a cosmic battle in which Yahweh triumphs over Israel's enemy, and we see in apocalyptic literature in general a facile equation of the righteous and the wicked with Israel and other nations. And then also we have this outpouring of blessings on God's people, city and land, and finally God's continued protection and presence, and nations who are not Israel's enemies join in the worship of God in that final time. Again note the important difference between classical prophecy and the apocalyptic literature. Both of them speak about final things, both of them speak about an end time, but the classical prophets did not in general expect that the course of human affairs would come to an end. Only that Israel's rebellion would end, or that Israel would live under a perfect king anointed by God. In the apocalyptic imagination history itself is a closed process. It will end, and then a new age, a new world order would begin. And the present age and the new age are qualitatively distinct. The present age is under the dominion of evil powers. We see it particularly in the apocalyptic writings outside of the Bible and in the New Testament. But that power that has dominion over the present age is Satan. Satan is the arch enemy of God. The age to come will be free of all evil, moral corruption, and death Satan will be defeated. But God himself is the one who has to do this. God must intervene to bring the present age to a crashing halt and initiate this new world order. So let's turn now to Daniel for a full apocalyptic work. Daniel also can be divided really into two parts. And the first six chapters have often been described as a heroic fiction. They're a bit like the book of Esther that we'll be talking about on Wednesday. Just a good story. Esther particularly has a lot of irony and is very, very funny. But like the book of Esther, Daniel features a Jew who lives in a Gentile court and he's saved from disaster. I've listed the kings who are discussed in the book of Daniel. These chapters tell of Daniel's adventures under two Babylonian kings, Numbuchednetser and Belchazar. The text says two Babylonian kings, Numbuchednetser and Belchazar. Median king Darius, who happens to be unknown to history. Persian king Cyrus, that's a whole lot of years. And the historical inaccuracy of the work. You have the chronology of more than a century being telescoped here. There's other inaccuracies. Belchazar was actually never a king. He was sort of a prince regent. He was defeated by Cyrus, not by Darius. So there's tremendous historical inaccuracy. And this is a sign that this was written at a much later time, looking back when the history of the period 300 years ago was very confused. There's no clear historical knowledge of this Persian period, Babylonian and Persian period. And so the book we know was written quite late, perhaps the end of the third century, those first six chapters. We have a better idea about the remainder of the book. Chapters 7 through 12 are fully apocalyptic in genre and they were composed between 167 and 164. I don't know if I wrote that up there. Yeah, 167 and 164 BCE. This was a time when Jews were suffering intense persecution at the hands of the Seleucid king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, Antiochus IV. And so Daniel is the latest book of the Hebrew Bible. It was chronologically the latest book written between 167 and 164 BCE. But the author writes in code. He writes in code so that some hostile person would not be able to understand, right? The author disguises his references to contemporary historical events and personalities in these visions, these symbolic visions that are attributed to a remote era of the past. Let's go back and look at the contents of these two sections. In chapters 1 through 6, Daniel is represented as a loyal Jew who's living in the exile in Babylonia, sixth century exilic period among idol worshipers. He refuses to bow down to any other God. He observes the dietary laws and he prays facing Jerusalem. He seems to occupy a position of some honor in the court. He has the power to interpret dreams and to predict the future. And although he's severely tested, he remains true to Yahweh and Yahweh aids him in more than one miraculous escape from danger. The main themes of this first section of the book of Daniel are Daniel's interpretations of the dreams of these kings, Nubuchednetzer, and his allegiance to his God. In chapter 2, Nubuchednetzer has a dream of a huge statue. It has a head of gold, it has a torso and arms of silver, the belly and the thighs are of bronze, the legs are of iron and the feet are of mixed iron and clay. I've kind of given you a little grid and in a minute we're going to have another symbolic dream that's going to use animals to represent the same things that are being represented here by the metals. So you have this statue with these metal and iron and clay feet. Then a great stone that's uncut by human hands flies from heaven and smashes the clay feet of the statue and the statue crumbles and this stone becomes a mountain that fills all the earth. Daniel decodes the dreams symbolism and it's a historical symbolism, the march of history. Each metal represents a kingdom that ruled the ancient Near East. Daniel only explicitly mentions gold as Babylon but we can figure out the rest. Silver is Medea, bronze is Persia, iron is Alexander's Greece, right? Macedonian Greece that conquered the ancient Near East in the 330s and brought Hellenism and introduced the Hellenistic period into ancient Near Eastern history. After Alexander's death his empire was divided into smaller Hellenistic kingdoms. The ones of greatest relevance to us are Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria because as you can imagine Palestine is caught between those two great powers. So it's going to be fought over by those two great powers. So you have Egypt ruled by the Ptolemies, you have Syria ruled by the Seleucids, they're wrangling for control of the land of Israel that's lying between them. So the iron and clay feet of the statue in Daniel's dream represent these lesser Hellenistic kingdoms of Egypt and Syria that succeeded Alexander's empire in our mix of Hellenistic and Eastern elements. The stone from heaven represents the future kingdom of God. It's going to come and destroy these godless kingdoms and fill all of the earth forever.  When they emerge unscathed the king is greatly impressed and so he acknowledges the god of Israel. In chapter 4 there's a second dream. It's interpreted by Daniel as a sign that Nebuchadnezzar will be struck down seven times. He's going to lose his reason, he's going to lose his throne until he realizes that God is the source of all divine and human power. And when this in fact comes to pass, Nebuchadnezzar seems to suffer a fit of insanity that drives him from society. The king then praises the god most high as the universal king. In chapter 5 Daniel's enemies at court trick the Median king now, Darius, so we're moving to different kings. They trick him into issuing an edict against those who pray to anyone but the king. This is a problem for Daniel. Daniel violates the edict, of course, and he's arrested and he's thrown into a den of lions, but he emerges unharmed. And the result is again that the foreign king, in this case Darius now, recognizes the supremacy of Yahweh and orders all in his kingdom to revere the Jewish god. There is of course no historical merit to these stories of Babylonian and Persian kings acknowledging or adopting the god of the Jews who lived in exile among them. These stories seem to give voice to the hope or the fantasy that a cruel and impious monarch might be taught humility by Yahweh. They also provide a model for life in the diaspora. Jews can live in the Gentile world, but they must never forget God and his laws. And then we move into the second half of the book of Daniel, chapters 7 to 12. As we move into this part of Daniel we switch from the third person into the first person. So Daniel 7 to 12 is written in the first person and it's fully apocalyptic. And here Daniel has a series of visions and dreams that are interpreted for him by an angel. And again that's a classic feature of the apocalyptic genre. And these visions again survey ancient Near Eastern history from the sixth to the second centuries. Chapter 7 again represents the succession of kingdoms, the Babylonian, the Median, the Persian, the Macedonian empires, but this time as beasts. So you have a lion, a bear, a winged leopard, and an ogre. The ogre has horns, and the horns of this ogre then represent these two lesser Hellenistic kingdoms, the Ptolemy's of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. The boastful little horn is the Syrian king, Antiochus Epiphanes himself. In a second vision the ancient of days, this is the term that's used, seems to be God in a white robe and a beard seated on a fiery chariot throne. But the ancient of days confers glory and kingship on one like a son of man. Now in Daniel this phrase a son of man which generally means mortal as opposed to divine in the Bible. But in Daniel the phrase seems to refer to a figure that's in human form but more than a human. Probably an angel like Michael or Gabriel, both of them are represented as leaders against the forces of Persia and Greece. And this figure establishes as everlasting kingdom to replace the bestial kingdoms that have preceded it. So the son of man overwhelms the little horn, Antiochus, who is said to be making war on saints. That's a code for loyal Jews who is said to have been trying to change their law and abolish their religion. And we know that these were parts of the persecution in 167 to 164 by Antiochus. He tried to stop worship in the sanctuary and so on. In a third vision then, the horn that represents Antiochus is said to trample the land of splendor, Israel, to challenge the army of heaven, to remove the perpetual sacrifice. Antiochus did halt the sacrifice, the sacrificial service in the temple, and to set up an abomination of desolation on the sacrificial altar. And we know that Antiochus set up some kind of pagan altar on the sacrificial altar in the temple in Jerusalem and erected a statue of Zeus in the sanctuary. So this depiction of the persecution under Antiochus is presented here but it's presented in veiled form for reasons of safety. In chapter 9 we have a moving prayer for deliverance. The angel Gabriel assures Daniel that the end is near and that the end was even predicted by Jeremiah who had said that Jerusalem would lie desolate 70 years, you will recall. Now Jeremiah prophesied, I'm going to do some math now so this is dangerous, Jeremiah prophesied in the early 6th century and the chapters of Daniel will written many centuries later, someone can figure it out in the 160s. So was Jeremiah prophesying falsely when he said that God would deliver Israel from her enemies and establish a kingdom in Judah in 70 years? No, not according to the book of Daniel because in the book of Daniel it said that Jeremiah also was speaking in a code. Jeremiah meant that 70 weeks of years which is to say 490 years would pass before the consummation of all things. And the last week was the reign of Antiochus epiphanies. We are in the last week of these years now. So the writer is maintaining that he's living in the last days, in the final moments of the last week of years. And this is very typical of apocalyptic literature. The time is at hand, we are in the final stage. This is now all the birth pangs of the Messiah, these terrible things that are being visited upon us. And God is soon going to win victory through a mighty act and introduce the messianic age ending Israel's long years of desolation. So apocalyptic literature sees history as determined. It's a closed drama that must be played out, requiring no action on the part of humans except faithful waiting. God's kingdom will come solely by God's power, but it has to be preceded by this time of trouble. These troubles are nothing but the birth pangs of the messianic age and the faithful, whose names are recorded in God's book, will be rescued. Chapter 12 imagines a resurrection of the dead as a compensation to those who died under the persecutions of Antiochus. It's a clear attempt to deal with the injustice that marrs this world. And it's the only passage of the Bible to explicitly espouse the idea of an individual life after death. And as I say, breaks with the longer Israelite tradition that's vague or silent on this issue. Not all Jews accepted the idea, but it would be essential to the rise of Christianity, which is deeply indebted to apocalyptic thinking. And through Christianity, it came to have a very far reaching impact on Western civilization. The Book of Daniel is a response to specific historical circumstances. It's a response to the crisis of persecution and martyrdom that was going on in the second century. That was a new kind of crisis that led to a new kind of response, because the earlier crises of 722 and 586, they could be explained as punishment for sin and faithlessness. But now in the second century, Jews were dying not because they were faithless, but precisely because they were faithful, because they refused to obey the decrees of Antiochus and to violate their law and covenant. And they were dying. So this new phenomenon of martyrdom really for the first time required new responses. And the Book of Daniel provides a fully apocalyptic response. Remain faithful. Wait, Daniel urges. Know that this will all be set right by God, not in this world, but in an ultimate and cataclysmic triumph of life and death, life and faith over death and evil. And it will be soon. And God, Daniel emphasizes God's firm control of history. And so bolsters loyal Jews who are suffering indignities and torture and even death all around him because of their faith. So we've seen the zealous fifth century response of Ezra and Nehemiah to the faithful events of Israel's history. They believed as Israel's rededication to God and the covenant involved as a first step cessation of intimate relations with foreigners, separation from their abominable practices. We've seen very different views that would integrate foreigners in the worship of Yahweh. We've seen also the later emergence of apocalyptic as an expression of present despair and future hope that entailed the divinely orchestrated and cataclysmic defeat of the wicked enemies who persecuted Israel. And in the last lecture, we're going to look at two books of the Hebrew Bible that take very different approaches, the Book of Esther and the Book of Jonah.


Alright folks, welcome. Let me share my screen. I put together a quick agenda. I was getting together some links and gathering some stuff and it turned into a whole presentation, so hopefully you will enjoy it. Here's the quick agenda. Just a regular operator framework update on what's going on. I just pulled off a few interesting things to talk about. I wanted to talk about OPM a little bit. I know we've talked about this in the past a little bit and pointed to this enhancement proposal. I just wanted to get some more attention on that. And then I wanted to give also a quick overview of a tool called Cuddle, which is a Kubernetes testing tool that we're going to be integrating into Scorecard, and I think some of that initial work has just landed or is about to land. So we'll talk through that. And then a great group of user researchers at Red Hat spend some time talking to operator authors about how they think about building operators, some of the issues that they're seeing and issues that they have just kind of understanding where to go next. So I just wanted to talk through some of that research. It's kind of interesting for the group to see. And then I doubt that will take us all the time. So we'll have a little bit of time left over for folks to, as always, talk about problems they're hitting in their projects, any questions they have, any advice, things like that. And if anybody else wants to talk about anything in particular, we can do that as well. And if you have any questions, this is totally collaborative. I just, these slides are a little formal, but I just wanted to collect some links and scroll through some stuff. And so we can interrupt as much as you want. All right. Let's cruise forward. First item I want to talk about is a bunch of work just landed to have a new type of update graph. So if you're familiar with the kind of model that we have today, every version of a CSV, which is the, you know, manifest that has a bunch of metadata about your operator says, I've replaced this version. And I can also, you can skip these versions to get to me is roughly kind of how it works. And so that's like an update graph, you know, like kind of like a graph database where you've got notes that connect things together, where you have to kind of explicitly create this graph. Each CSV you need to, you know, go say this, which one this replaces and all this stuff and it's a little bit cumbersome if you don't need that complexity. So we added a Simver based update graph, which is just, you know, the regular Simver process. OLM will just upgrade you according to that major minor patch versioning scheme like we're all used to. This is really cool because you don't want to be explicit about your update graph. And then, you know, you can just tag your releases as you normally do, ship them into a catalog and you're good to go. And this is going to be really, really cool. So I wanted to, I've got one kind of screenshot of what this looks like in the docs. This is in the enhancements proposal, I believe, for Simver based updates. And so you can see here that, you know, you just have your STD operator and instead of having to put this replaces field right here and being very explicit about it, you go from, you know, one nine or zero nine zero to zero nine two. You can just omit that and move forward. So pretty cool. Should be like a very small win. But I think it's going to be very popular. And then following that is then Simver support in the skip range so that you can skip to different versions in the, in the Simver. This is if you happen to release something that doesn't work. Like you, you thought if you get a bug report or something like that, you can get a new version out and start skipping that. And so always when you're doing anything related to updates, please, please test and please, please think a little bit further ahead and how you future proof yourself. I can save everybody a lot of headache instead of being super reactionary. So you can find this. This is in the operator life cycle manager repo PR 834. If you want to look at more. Some other updates. We've talked a few times on these calls about this new bundle format. This is basically a little bit of a change up of how that operator metadata is submitted. And this is really teasing it apart from kind of this, this one main cluster service version file to being separate files. You can just ship if you, you know, you use a deployment to run your operator and you want to include an RBAC set of rules and you need to ship a secret and a config map with it. You can just throw this into a directory and just like have those files, you know, stay as regular YAML file standalone instead of having to kind of massage them around in this format. That's roughly what it is.  You just have an image registry like we all do to use Kubernetes and you can put these catalogs on there as well. What's exciting is for the community operators, this is the repo we have in GitHub that is the collection of all the community operators. You can submit those in both formats and those will be converted behind the scenes if they are the older format to the newer bundle format so that newer versions of OLM can fetch those dynamically without kind of knowing what happened, which is really great. So these are transition period into this new format and then we'll move over to that at some date in the future. If you wanted to learn more about this OPM tool, which is a way to curate your own sets of these catalogs, so this community operators repo is just one giant catalog of all the operators and all of its versions so you can upgrade between them. You can also make your own catalogs and so this is a great way to do that and there's some enhancements which I wanted to circulate this link around. This is a better, I guess more curative view of even a curative catalog so you can say I want these very specific versions only and what this can help you do is to remove some of the bulk if you're mirroring into like a disconnected environment. It might be gigs and gigs and gigs of containers pulling versions of operators that you don't care about and so you can pick a few to be selective about. I wanted to, I think actually I have a screenshot, yeah, so this OPM tool is inside of the operator registry repo and I was just going to click over to the dock here that has some of the commands. I think I was just going to talk to them a little bit and this gives you a little bit of a sense of how it works. So you have this registry which is the underlying database that is holding all of this information and so you can add and remove things from that database and then serve that out. That's the GRPC calls that the cluster can use but then you've also have this index which can make it easier to ship container images directly to clusters and it's got kind of the same types of commands here so you can see that you're building certain bundles and then tagging it inside of a container and that is what you would ship to your end user, put it in your registry and then have that added to the cluster. So pretty cool and a lot of nice commands you could easily add this as part of a CI run or something like that as part of your release process. I don't know if anybody has any other information to add. There's some export commands as well so if you want to dump these for offline mirroring if you do need to burn them to a DVD or whatever and get them into a secure environment you can do that as well. I forget what the fellow's name is that he is working on some of the US government tooling for doing curated operator catalogs and his company got a contract to build some offline capabilities for operators so this type of stuff will be really interesting for him. And I don't know if any of the folks on the OLM team or SDK team want to comment on any of this but it's all pretty exciting work. Some of the reasoning and justification for it are just a lot around easing use of loading in operators into clusters for testing as well as curating them if you are an admin team and you want to ship the same catalog to five different clusters or something like that. So pretty cool. Let me get back to my presentation. I can add one new thing to this. That's okay Rob. Yeah, so the past couple of weeks we've merged some new changes that a lot of those opm commands currently or I should say used to shell out to Docker and podman to deal with images. A certain set of them now can do this without shelling out to either Docker or podman they don't require a privileged container demon of any sort. That's export and then any of the registry add and the index add commands. I'll have this as an option. Okay, very cool. Yeah, so that'll make it a little bit easier to get everybody on the same page without having the same runtime installed. All right jumping back over. I'll share out all these links so you can have them as well. I wanted to throw out an open question for the group, which is I just wanted to gauge the level of interest in multi arch operators and you know running on different architectures. Has anybody explored this today or has any interest or here's this from. I'm telling you a community member in Kiali has already semi pushed a PR for this. They want arm support. Okay, cool arm. Yeah, this is already an ongoing request at least for our team. Awesome. Yeah, because the so with the, you know, Registry specs, you can have manifest lists of all your architectures and so I think it's more of a question of For things like operator hub and scorecard and some of the testing pipelines that we have. It's how do we best support these multi arch operators in terms of testing or Do you know, because these environments for things like mainframes or whatever can be a little esoteric versus things like arm, but you know, we don't have our machines in our pipeline today anyways. So it's more of just a sounds like there is at least some interest and maybe that'll be a future topic. Maybe we can start up on the mailing list about how to best do this. I know red hat internally for our product teams. We have some stronger guidelines for exactly how to do multi arch that we can learn from as well, but you know, we can tightly control those environments. So it's a little bit easier to force folks to do the right thing. Any last comments on that any other, any use cases that you've heard of. All right, keep it on the back burner and we'll revisit. Next thing I want to cover is the cuddle testing tool. This is a tool from D to IQ that they use to test some of their operators that they built. And what we're looking at doing for this is to run this as part of the operator scorecard. Just as a way to, you know, because right now the scorecard kind of does some like, we do some CSV and bundle validation as part of our pipelines. And then the scorecard will kind of check some best practices and make sure that the operator can be installed correctly. None of the required CRDs are owned by other things. And, you know, like kind of that type of stuff. But it doesn't have any like assertion based logic around go to deploy database with my database operator or go start this machine learning pipeline or whatever it is. And assert that it actually worked the way that it did. And so that's what the cuddle tool brings you. And so it's in the Cudo builder org on GitHub, but I thought it would be interesting to walk through there writing your first test guidelines. This is a really good example of so this is just really simple and engine next deployment with three replicas. And then you're starting that you did get three replicas out of it at the end. That's kind of, you know, as easy as it gets. And you can run through a bunch of different test cases with this. I think it'll be a really exciting way to we want to allow folks to package these up and send them to our pipeline as a way to actually, you know, validate this works. I think with the end goal of it would be awesome to have a bunch of different Kubernetes providers hooked into a test framework where we can, you know, test out the current versions of all some of the cloud offerings or some of the other offers and then even test pre-release versions of Kubernetes against these operators and things like that. That would be pretty cool. So this is just setting some of the groundwork for that. So you can find more information at cuddle.dev and you'll find this guide here. There's a few other kind of tips and tricks and things like that that are kind of interesting. But for the most part, it's pretty straightforward, which is really cool. I'm curious. I don't know if anyone has anyone played around with this already or has a testing framework that they like today that they're using. I hesitate to say but I've worked with cuddle. I was one that, you know, separated it out of kudo and I'll add I'll just add out there that there is. There was a conference, a virtual conference that was put together, a 30 minute video was created on on getting started with this and I can make sure that people have access to that. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, let's let's definitely get that out. I think it would be interesting to a lot of folks. I was this different. I mean, clearly I could see kind of how it's different, but what I mean what about molecule? I thought that was supposed to be the operator test framework. Yeah, I'm not sure I don't know enough. This is Ken speaking again I will throw out there that there's also a meeting with the same testing group today in a couple hours and we'll be showing cuddle off to them. I guess the creation of cuddle and the reason it exists is, you know, is consistent with what we were trying to do with kudo, which was to have a declarative way to manage operators and it just made sense to have a declarative way of testing, and this actually are consistent with what you would expect your Yamal or your experience with kipper 90s to be, we just use them as either applies or updates, oftentimes with strategic merging so you can be brief, as well as asserts. And it's still got some, you know, runway, there's still things that we'd like to add in and take advantage of but I'll have to look at the other other options out there. And I wouldn't expect this to be an all in one solution for sure. And it's definitely probably best as more of an end to end test than it would be, or certainly more so than a unit test. There are some elements of it that work well with an integration test though as well. The molecule is the testing tool for Ansible and Ansible based operators scaffold a lot of resources to make molecule testing of your operators easier and that's work is sort of alongside this. Okay. As I understand it, the molecule testing framework, the operator doesn't necessarily have to be implemented in Ansible. No, no, no, but that's why it has been integrated into the project. So that you're, you can continue testing all of your Ansible content, including operators with the same tools that you use to test your Ansible. And yeah, you can use it for whatever you want, but. Cuttle is they're not they're not quite overlapping. The other little bit of information here from the SDK side is that we're trying to integrate cuddle into our scorecard. So our new scorecard is going to be like a very generalized test runner based like an image runner. I will have some custom test images, one of which will be a cuddle based test image that basically execute your contests and then outputs the results in a way that scorecard can consume them. So be able to look out for that in the next probably month or two. And Ken, like, if you're interested in helping us integrate that, that would be absolutely awesome. Yeah, I'm totally in. Let's let's organize around that that would be great. Perfect. Awesome. Yeah, looking forward to that and it's going to be awesome. Any other questions on testing and in that whole topic before we move on. All right, last topic of my slides. I just wanted to talk through some of the research that. The red hat user experience design research team did around operators and when I get this information out far and wide, you know, it's, there's nothing proprietary here. These folks just happened to work for red hat. So at the high level. So this was a pretty small survey in the sense that it was seven internal operator authors and two external operator authors. I'm going to do a follow up study to try to get at least five more external operator authors to even out those numbers. But just talking them through how they built their first operators, any pain points where they are today, that kind of thing. I thought the interesting thing that jumped out to me is even though everybody was familiar with kubernetes, just, you know, either a user and you know, is creating deployments and like debugging pods and all that kind of stuff. They still had to learn a lot of kube fundamentals to build an operator just because you're using the deeper parts of it, then you get kind of if you scratch the surface on just running some applications and talking about how to control loops work and the caching layers and some of the things like that. So everybody had to learn something which was really interesting. And that kind of feeds into the next topic, which is that the docs and some of the learning resources were seen in a little bit of scattered and especially actual examples of real operators. I know that the framework is guilty of having some of its first things, you know, building your sample operators that are not real applications. You know, they're just basically standing up one or two pods and that's basically it. So I think that's some good advice that we need to move forward with. Folks were using the SDK, which is great and are doing some testing but want better end to end test support. So that's good to hear as folks want to, you know, get production quality operators. And if they are, you know, going to be pursuing this as part of a community or an organization that's going to buy or sell this operator, you know, they need to be bulletproof. So that's awesome. And we, you know, this kind of very much lines up with the roadmap that we have planned for the Operator Framework. Some of the upgrading of the SDK itself, there were some concern for breaking changes that were hard to find. I know that we're, you know, we just adopted some of the lower level tools from some of the SIGs with the controller runtime and the cube builder work. So I think that kind of falls under this. That was probably not a hard to find breaking change as we changed the project layout. But hopefully going forward, we won't have those types of issues. One cool thing is the capability model is used by all folks. Everyone used that as a reference point for kind of how to chart their path with the operator. The confusion stems from the capability model is vague by design because it can't talk to every type of application or every single kind of custom situation. But that confusion, you know, leads to folks not knowing how all of the steps that the capability model fit their operator. And so I think there's maybe some work to do there. But it is great to see that it is used as a reference for other folks. And so like I said, this is a pretty small sample, but you can learn a lot from just small samples of folks. And, you know, we're clearly seeing some trends here. Any questions on that? I have a few more slides I'm just digging in a little bit deeper. But anybody want to plus one anything of these things that you run into? Better ETE test support. Although I don't know how much you guys are going to be able to have this now. Yeah. Yeah, I'll plus one it. This is really great to get this kind of feedback. Yeah, I know it's a small sample set, but really, really great. Yeah, this is good to know. Awesome. Let's dig in a little bit deeper. So the some of the major conclusions here around docs were that it wasn't clear how stuff fit like fully end to end going from I've never, you know, written any of this before to download in the SDK to getting started. And then wanting to reference real code. And this is something that I see a lot when I talk to folks is like, well show me the best operator out there. Or, you know, and it's more like, okay, well, what type of application are you going for? What technology do you think you're going to use? Or do you not care about that? And like, it's just tough. So I think getting some some better results there and not having to just tell folks to go Google it and having some best of breed operators, which I think operator hub does help to highlight, but not all of those make it easy to get back to their source code and things like that. I think there's some work to do there. And then testing once again, you know, there are some testing facilities inside of the SDK for folks that are using that. Obviously need to be building up those more and more, and we'll be doing that over time. And then upgrades and, you know, the concern to break in the operator. I'm going to read into this and that it's both of new versions of the SDK as well as new versions of cube. And then how those influence new releases of your operator, you know, like that three way matrix can be pretty challenging as well as when APIs are either being deprecated or, you know, changed around in either upstream cube or some of the Kubernetes offerings and understanding the dependencies around all of that, I think completely makes sense. Pause there really quick comments questions. Plus ones on the capability model folks, I think we're very successful with this using it as a guiding stars is exactly what it's designed to do. And, you know, the structure of this does make it a little bit difficult to figure out how it applies to you but it's kind of a critical thinking exercise on the behalf of the user. But maybe we can strengthen this a little bit. I know that Daniel Messer wrote a bunch more actual text descriptions that are in GitHub that kind of talk to each one of these things. And there's like, like questions to think about for how to know if these apply to you and then some guiding principles around what to do and then some examples. So maybe in the follow up study, making sure that folks see that document at least after the studies over to get their feedback on that I think maybe would be a really good step. And then lastly, some of the like, I guess, a little less major outcomes were other types of resources. So are there more real time things like slack. I know we've got the Kubernetes operators channel there. Like code examples, you know, other than the ones that we have highlighted already and books and other things like that. One thing that we do have underway is the operator framework website. This is moving a little bit slower than I would like, but we're, you know, it's a lot of work to write all this content. And so if anybody wants to help get involved with that. I think those there, those repos are currently in kind of the person who was messing around with some of the Hugo stuff in his personal GitHub, but we'll be moved to the operator framework or here really soon. And so we'll, we'll take any pull request that anybody wants to send our way. And that'll, you know, talk a little bit more about the capability model and things like that. You know, this is really great insight and what I'm curious about and perhaps there's a, you know, a room for our conversation here. Having exposure to the API machinery where they're looking to rewrite essentially the philosophy and discipline necessary to have a good API. And that is specifically around a, you know, a web API resources, which then are tangentially connected to clients and to controllers, obviously. What I'm seeing is a lot of people expressing that there's a lack of information. And I'm wondering who's responsible, right, and I feel like in order for operator SDK to be successful that education has to be there. Do we take ownership of that and just drive it or, you know, do we come together as a community and, and, you know, I don't know, that's that's really the question is, there's a lot of organizations and frameworks out there I think that would benefit from it. And someone's got to own it. And I don't really see a full owner unless we're saying that we're looking to do that. I think you're right. If, if it's how our users are successful, then we probably at least need to have on it. But yeah, coming together with that SIG or the other other folks make sense too. Okay, yeah, sounds like we're on the same thought. Maybe we just need to start making some connections or, or yeah, I, well, you made the comment it's taken longer and there's a lot of effort to create this website. I believe that, you know, content creation is usually underestimated. And so, you know, what can we do to drive it? It seems like an, I guess it's not a surprise that it's an afterthought from a developer standpoint, but it also seems like it's absolutely necessary to see a high adoption of what we are all interested in I would hope. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I mean, just the cuddle website that we were looking at earlier is a really great example of this where I think we've got a little bit more content to cover than that. But it's a really nicely put together website that, you know, is front and center with here's what this is and here's how to get started. Some things that this website I think will do really well is have a unified place for just even the definition of an operator. Here's what we see an operator doing things like the capability model. How do you like, how do I know if these operators are good or not? And then expressing the differences of the different types of SDKs that you can use or you don't have to use an SDK and where the life cycle manager fits in and, you know, all that stuff is all kind of wrapped up in there. So hopefully all that and more are covered there, including I think, you know, this type of information as well. I think you made a really good point where we're talking about was Ken, which is that, you know, operators are heavily aligned with independent on Kubernetes APIs. I don't think much operator documentation calls out that you need to be very aware of those API conventions and patterns and that writing an operator people will be using those APIs and expect them to follow the same conventions as Kubernetes APIs. So do you think there's a big gap there right now that we could do a lot to help flesh out? Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it was Ken. Yeah. What we are going to add or change or what's being suggested at this point to the API element is the, when it was, well, the content that's available online today doesn't even include the concept of CRDs. And so CRDs will be added. But as exactly, I think we're aligned on that. I think if we allow them to do APIs and then we do operators, they're still going to be a little bit of a mismatch and it would be best to unify around this somehow. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great. That is all the research outputs. And I think that's everything that I had plans. Now I think we're into the open agenda of the call. Does anybody have anything that they want to chat about? Hi everyone. This is Matt from the operator enablement team. Just letting you all know, just in case anyone's asking you. We are in the process of getting the interactive learning exercises at learn.openshift.com. Specifically the operator framework ones updated to latest version of operator SDK and for X environments. So I know we've had a lot of people ask about this and we are working with the Cata Coda team. We're the ones that develop that interactive terminal environment and that should be ready soon. Awesome.  So very cool. Thank you for all that hard work. Anybody working on something cool? Oh, go ahead. There's nothing to ask. So the service mesh team is currently undergoing work to get disconnected mode to work, right? Not pulling stuff down from Quay, but from some internal repository. So there were discussions last week about the whole related images stuff and how that's not implemented yet. The question is, is there a time frame when the related images stuff is going to be implemented whereby the shaws can get replaced or the shaws can replace the tags, the whole annotation stuff. I don't know if you remember the emails going off last week, but there are some issues there that we need to get fixed in order to at least make things easier. We have workarounds now, but we'd like to get that stuff in. I can probably help with this, but I do think I'm curious why this is important. Because essentially what we're maybe I should level set. So we're talking about the same thing. Right now there's a related image field in the CSV that you can list out images that your operator might require at a particular region. So when you pull that manifest, you can read that list and then that's another thing, another set of images to mirror to make sure your operator works offline or disconnected. The thing that hasn't been implemented is a feature that Olin would do at runtime where it takes those values in the related images fields and projects them down onto the template annotations of your deployment spec. So that when we stamp out a deployment, those values are available via like the downward API at runtime. So the reason that that has not been a priority is because you probably already have to do, sorry, not probably you already have to do the work of placing those images in the related images field. And so if you're already doing that step, you can also do some replacement elsewhere for matching the same string in the CSV so that you don't have to rely on. So is it not true then if we place the tags in the related images, Olin will not be able to determine what those shots should be and replace the shots right in with the tags? I should say yes and no. Olin doesn't do anything with the related images. It's purely metadata that's used by tooling for building offline catalogs. So right now what it will do is if you put a tag, it'll mirror to a tag if you're using the offline tooling in the OC tool. If you put a shot, it'll mirror to a shot. But for OCP disconnected, it's a requirement that all mirrored images be digests. Okay. So the answer to your question is like, we don't have a timeline for it because it hasn't been a priority. And so what I do want to understand is why it's a priority for you. Well, I was under the assumption that in our related images, we could just put what we've been used tags, right? And then somehow some magic under the covers would say, okay, well, we're going to mirror this tag to the shot. And then that shot is then going to be placed, like you said, in the pod template of the deployment so we can then pass it down to environment variables for the operator to use. But if you're saying no, that's never going to be the case, you have to put the shot in the CSV, then yes, clearly, you know, big deal, we'll just put in the related images and in the, and in wherever we else we need it. That just means I wouldn't say never. I didn't mean to say that we should never do this. I was just trying to explain why it's not been a priority now. I think the idea is a good one. Well, okay. So if you're going to ask, why is it a priority? If that feature existed, then we would use it. So that's my only concern. Okay. Thanks. I can come back and talk about more, more that later. All right. Any other topics, questions, concerns? Anyone building anything cool? So I had a question. Yeah, go for it. How are you guys setting up and tearing down Kubernetes environments when you're doing testing? Basically, right now, I'm using a proprietary tool in my company, but I'm looking for a standardized way to create Kubernetes clusters as set up and tear down for a test in GKE, vanilla cops, OpenShift, all of these. Sorry if it's a very broad topic. This is why I actually plus one the bullet point, one of the slides, better ETE testing. This is that was what I was thinking. Yeah, so like, if I understand correctly, right now, there is no standard way to do this, right?  That's what I do. Right now we use. Yeah, I would say that it depends on what you're doing, which is probably part of the problem. We use Terraform quite heavily, along with Ansible. I would add that Kudo, I'm sorry, Cuddle, that test tool that we were talking about actually has a pretty tight integration with kind. If kind is the kind of cluster you want, it's kind of baked in, you get a small version of things, but that doesn't really help you when you're looking to do like GPU oriented things or large cluster oriented things. And yeah, so I don't think there's a, I don't think there's a one all, one solution out there that sells it all yet. Yeah, yeah. No, I was thinking actually, if you want to just create the clusters and not kind of like simulate them with the kind or anything like that, maybe do it with GitHub actions or something, but very early stage, I don't have this. Yeah, that's for me. If I could just boil down the question. So what you're asking for is like, is there some tool that we all use to just spin up and spin down Kubernetes clusters. Yeah, yeah, basically, you have a test suite, right, of multiple tests, I guess, and you do a setup and a tear down before and after, right. So let's say the suite is done with Cuddle, I have to look into that tool. But I mean, the tear down and set up are not, I think, right. So like, we're all addressed, I think, a similar problem, right. I mean, we're all addressing, I think, maybe, because we want our operators to work on as many environments as possible, basically. Yeah, part of the problem. Sorry. Yeah, part of the problem right is that there isn't a definitive cluster flavor. You know, part of the standard includes an openness to what you're doing for networking openness to what you're using for containerization. It to to propose that there is a thing that is your standard is to, you know, cookie cut something that works for you and maybe not all the things. Yeah, yeah, that's that's the problem as much as I figured out. Yeah. Operator development the hard way. Yeah, I think for like a peer cube answer, I would probably suggest that we should look into something like candy. That seems to be gaining some traction even upstream with people using candy as the as the way to spin up and spin down Kubernetes clusters under test. Inside of their proud config so candy might be something to look into. That would be the best answer I have for right now of how I was just doing it is as a GitHub action that probably spends up a candy cluster for your test with and then, you know, it's just a bunch of Docker containers. So just tear it down and you're good to go. That would be the best thing to look into for that side of the test today. Yeah. I don't know if that helps at all. Okay, I'll look into it. Thanks guys. I'm sorry you were saying, candy. Yes, sorry, it's a KIND. Okay, gotcha gotcha. Yeah, no I apologize that's explicit should be better. I'll add to the chat brings us to the end of our agenda, unless there's any other twice. All right, thank you all for joining. Appreciate it. Thanks for our great presentation. Bye guys.


the top 10 best movies you've never seen. Hey what's up guys it's Josh here today I want to do a top 10 list on basically my top 10 most underrated movies that I've seen. I would be surprised if you've seen over five and they kind of go across a lot of genres here so there is a couple horror scary movies you're either going to like those or not but I have kind of a little bit of a mix of everything for this list. I'm not going to put them in order I actually like all these movies to a certain extent and it's actually hard for me to pick like one specific one but I do have about 10 and here they are running scared with Paul Walker. Now I actually rewatched this with a buddy of mine about a year ago I actually really enjoy this movie it has a few kind of flaws to it it does go over the top there is a little bit of a like an overdone sex scene in the beginning and the story is really really good it does get a little convoluted in the middle but it does have some really good twists in store and it is extremely intense it's probably the most intense Paul Walker movie I've ever seen and probably the best performance I've ever seen it's kind of got a slightly complex story Paul Walker is with this mob group and they end up getting that in a shootouts and then they find out that the people they just shot were cops so they're they're leaving they're freaking out that they just shot these cops and some of the mob guys hand all their guns to Paul Walker for Paul Walker to dispose of them make them make sure they're gone there's no proof of these guns anywhere so Paul Walker takes them and puts the guns in his basements Paul Walker's neighbor is a little boy sees Paul Walker put the gun in the basement takes the gun and then shoots his stepdad with the gun and then runs away with it and if Paul Walker can get caught up for this he's pretty much dead he has to just find the gun and get rid of it as fast as it can very interesting story but I just find it to be really really intense and again I wish it was a little bit more polished and smooth but I really do think if you're a fan of really aggressive lots of cussing and action and violence this is actually a good one to check out okay identity now this is one that I've really heard nobody talk about but I think it's one of the most unique kind of murder mystery style stories that I've ever seen and it has a lot of good actors slash actresses in it and I just really enjoy this movie again this one is a little hard to describe you have this bald guy and he committed a bunch of murders and he's supposed to have multiple personalities so you have this one story where they're kind of trying to get him tried as insane because he has all these multiple personalities that's one story the other story is you have a bunch of about 10 12 people and it's a really stormy night and no matter what they do they're just forced into this motel like if they leave the motel they're stuck back there and somebody at the motel is a murderer so they can't escape the motel and they know that there's a murder there somewhere the murder is committing these very violent acts and they're basically trying to figure out who it is everybody kind of has a little bit of a secret to them so a lot of the people who seem bad and suspicious in the beginning you know it's more of the other people that where you don't know the bad things that they've done you start to not really know who it is because everybody's got a little bit of a bad streak to them it's hard to describe but those people at the motel are all of his personalities like fighting each other off one by one so every time somebody gets murdered at the hotel the bald guy is like losing one of his many personalities and one of those personalities is a killer i actually really really enjoyed this movie it's a very unique murder mystery like to me i get it when i watch it but just trying to explain to you right now it's just got enough complexity to where it's like just watch the movie it's got some really good twist it's very unique check it out okay the curve now i absolutely fell in love with the curve the first time that i saw it i was watching a bunch of scream inspired movies because i really like scream um scream has a great you know twist ending same with urban legend i really enjoyed that as well ended up coming across this movie the curve and there's a lot of parts in this movie that are really hard to watch and dull and actually didn't make me feel that good but this movie has about a 10 minute montage at the end i think it's about three twists i don't really want to ruin the twist for you and tell you exactly how many there is but there's this 10 minute montage where you know it just twists and twists and twists and i was just absolutely blown away by this movie almost nobody has seen it i remember when i first watched it there hadn't been a review on youtube i actually did a review as well but i think somebody between the time that i first watched it and the time that i did a review there was somebody else who did make a review on this movie it's very cringy it's actually a little bit hard to watch but i feel like the payoff at the end is just so good because you do not expect it okay brick now i actually just saw this movie and when i was searching it on youtube i think like chris stuckman or one of these famous movie reviewers like 10 years ago made a movie about how good brick is and it's like one of the most underrated movies of all time and i just absolutely love this movie from beginning to end i actually was going through a dry spell of watching movies and i kind of just couldn't get myself to like really get engaged to watch a movie because i had seen so many ones that i just didn't like i had some stuff to do but i'm like let me just put on brick for 10 20 minutes and see if i can get invested with the story so that i want to keep watching and i just didn't want to put this movie down i had no idea that i was literally going to watch as much as the movie as i possibly could and i really just didn't want to do anything else but finish the movie i just really enjoyed it's very indie it's just very unique but in my opinion i just was very invested the whole time and it's for somebody who likes a really really quality story it's set in like 2005 high school but it feels like a 50s new and war mystery movie i know it sounds weird but they even had the kids i think studying old like 40s and 50s lingo in preparation for this movie i just really really enjoyed brick super solid review coming soon from me the count of monty kristo i absolutely love this movie this movie is so good i heard about it like the old one and then the new one and i think most people when they hear the count of monty kristo it's probably something that they they will say that they've heard before but i was absolutely blown away by this movie um it's just an unbelievable tale of redemption this guy's got a great girl he's invested in everything's going good and he's got a jealous best friend it's all kind of complicated but the jealous best friend like rats him out screws him over and a long process happens where he's pretty much shipped to jail forever and slowly but surely he's like basically learning tricks to become a man and he's trying to escape this prison and by the time he gets to the final point in this movie he's just an absolute boss some of the scenes with his former girlfriend when he gets reunited with her or has a chance to talk to her those scenes are just the tension is just so so good this movie pretty much gave me even more than i expected and it's just such a unique tale i feel like they don't tell stories like this nowadays really really really enjoy the count of monty kristo something i could watch yearly or anybody who hasn't seen it i have no problem putting it on and just watching it anytime okay the ref i think this is from 1992 there's a youtuber named kody leech and i really like his youtube reviews and a lot of the times that he recommends something it's some sort of classic some sort of nostalgic thing most of the time it just doesn't hit for me and i've watched a lot of the movies that he used to like from back in the day and just for me like i was saying it just really didn't hit for me but the ref i absolutely loved i love almost everything about this movie it's got like just the perfect length it's got you know some really funny quirky family moments in it um it kind of has a feel good ending story where every endings every story has kind of like a good satisfying feel it's just a movie that i really like and it's very christmas oriented i've kind of noticed that you know which movies have like a halloween very theme so i could watch on halloween and which movies have like a very christmassy theme and to me i just really really enjoy this movie i find it funny i find it unique normally i don't like the kind of character that denis larry plays in this movie it's kind of like a stereotype i've seen before but i just really really enjoyed this movie an excellent suggestion from kody leech okay paranormal activity the marked ones now this one is rated super super low so beware but this is by far my favorite found footage horror movie um i was kind of a little bit newer to horror when i started watching the first paranormal activity i watched it in theaters with one of my ex-girlfriends and i actually found it to be very very interesting and very very entertaining in the theaters in one watch now when you look back at it there's very little things that happen it's just like these slight suspense buildings and just a big punch at the end but i kind of have a special place in my heart for remembering the paranormal activities and i've seen them all but um paranormal activity the marked ones is totally different from any other paranormal activity movie although it does tie into the original story once you get to the middle and the end but it is completely unique most of the paranormal activity movies had to deal with i think her name was katie so it's just about these white girls white family white girls you know that's the end of it this one is takes place in an apartment complex and all the characters are mainly mexican and for some reason this movie is just by far the best paranormal activity it's entertaining throughout it doesn't just have like one or two small scenes or small jump scares it actually kind of keeps you guessing towards the end and then if you've also seen some of the older paranormal activities it's just really satisfying that they tie that story into this story and there was a point in the marked ones where it looks like it's going to end the same way as another movie it's like the same exact shot but then something else happens so it's just a really really enjoyable movie and by far my favorite found footage horror movie period i know it gets terrible ratings so maybe you don't like it but and i know that there's a lot of people who you know found footage horror that's kind of like a real interesting niche of who would enjoy that movie but i really really enjoyed the marked ones when i first saw it i also rewatched it with one of my friends and he had nothing bad to say about it i just really enjoy it okay this is an interesting one uh bloodshot from 2020 with ven diesel now hear me out ven diesel for me is very very hit or miss i love his older stuff i love him in the fast and furious i like to be honest i really like triple x but there's a lot of movies that he just make that it just doesn't really do much for me when he did the remake of triple x i wasn't really into it you know he's done all these movies that i remember watching him i remember checking him out but it's like boy did they not hit and it's just something i really wouldn't want to watch besides my favorites ven diesel movies this is probably the one that i'd want to watch the most i almost want to watch this more than like pitch black or a more retic or like the knock around guys or that one where he's like an apocalypse like eating a wolf most of the ven diesel movies i would prefer this bloodshot too he is aging you know quite a bit and so for him to start as a superhero when he's like 50 55 and then he's gonna have to have like a 30 year old girl in the movie and it's just was like because i'm so hit and miss with ven diesel i was really thinking that this movie was not going to be good and then almost nobody talked about it nobody has anything good to say about it but i found this movie really enjoyable to watch like i was saying like maybe in the top five most ven diesel movies i'd want to watch if you can if you count like the fast and furious franchise is one there's a lot of ven diesel movies that i would never want to see again and i really do not mind this movie to be honest it's got a little bit of a unique story it's not the most unique story i've ever seen but it takes a while to really understand what's going on like the first 10 or 15 minutes he's like an army guy and he's going to like do this extraction and i'm not going to ruin anything else in the movie but literally none of that matters because of what's actually happening in the movie once you find out 30 45 minutes 60 minutes in i just found this to be a really enjoyable watch i do wish it had a little bit more intense CGI because they kind of save it for one big huge bout at the end and i think they made this on like 60 million dollars so it didn't have like a hundred or 200 million dollar budget but to be honest guys i've just really enjoyed this and i'm somebody who i'm really picky with ven diesel movies and this one was a very easy watch for me okay constantine now i know this was really big when it came out i remember seeing tons of you know promotions for it things like that i remember actually talking to my friend and he would like always say oh john constantine oh you got a john constantine him but besides that guy who said that i don't know anybody who's ever talked about constantine in a good way i actually really really really enjoy this movie it's almost like it's just a totally different sci-fi experience they really create an interesting world here i'm always been interested in like somebody recreating a heaven and a hell and a very interesting believable spiritual realm in this movie uh john constantine he like has this ability to where he could like open up like the spiritual realm a little bit or he could open up like the hell realm a little bit and he's just kind of like a good guy deep down but then he also he he sins a lot he smokes a lot of cigarettes so he's kind of in the middle but i just really really enjoyed constantine it's like a very interesting story of good and evil there's a point at the end where you actually see the devil and i really like the actor in there and i found it to be so so so unique just the way that they did the whole devil scene at the end and just the way this movie wraps up i just really really found it interesting and for me i almost might prefer it to like the john wicks just for me personally because i just really like the mythology and the lore and all the extra places this this one goes by the end there was a few little weird parts like i think there's like a part where there's just like this guy walking in the desert and i remember that wasn't the most interesting part of the movie and i don't think that really had too too much to deal with it but i really enjoyed constantine okay my last one i'm gonna have to go with inside man now this one is one with clive oan denzel washington denzel washington is just i absolutely love him and anything i'm happy to see him in anything he's just one of the best actors ever but inside man is very it's a very very unique heist style movie they let you know very very early on that clive oan is like the main guy who's like robbing this bank he's the one who's doing all the talking and he seems very very in control as if there's things that he knows that all the police don't know so he's like he's in there he's doing all this weird stuff he's asking for planes and all this and it's just a very very unique serious movie and i found like the twist ending here or the kind of answer to what his secret is and the answer to kind of like their trick behind the bank robbery it was very unique but also very very practical this is just a really good interesting watch very serious kind of alluring very entertaining and mysterious and it's got a very good practical yet believable ending really do like inside man let me know what you think of my list let me know which movies of these ones that you've seen down below i'd be very surprised if you'd seen more than five based on the genres you like there's certain ones you're going to be more interested in and if there's also some other movies that are just nobody talks about but you think are so so good let me know down below these ones were definitely my best let me know what you guys think down below let me know some other underrated movies we're on the road of 50 000 subscribers and i could not do it without any of you guys help you guys are the best i'm having a great day out here hopefully having a great day at home see you on the next video peace