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What does the BIBLE really say? With dr. Dan McClellan · The Smart Cookies podcast

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  Dr. Daniel McClellan is an independent scholar of the Bible and religion and an honorary
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  fellow at the University of Birmingham's Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion.
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  He's the winner of the Society of Biblical Literatures' 2023 Richards Award for Public
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  Scholarship. And on top of all this, he has a fantastic and fantastically popular TikTok
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  and YouTube channels where he tackles common questions and misunderstandings about the
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  Bible. Dr. McClellan, welcome to the show.
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  Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
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  An absolute pleasure. Getting ready for this interview, I quickly realized one thing that
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  kind of shocked me. I was raised Catholic. I'm not religious anymore, but I did go to
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  what back home in Slovenia we call Verauk or some sort of Catholic Bible school for
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  eight years. I also did all the Catholic sacraments, you know, baptism, confirmation,
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  etc. But even so, I never ever, not even once, actually read the Bible. And I didn't realize
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  that until very recently. What actually opened my eyes was a standup bit of all things. I
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  forgot who it was from exactly. I think it might have been Bill Burr because he's Catholic.
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  I watched it a while back. And during the bit, he says that he has for the first time
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  just read the Bible at the ripe age of 53 or something. And that's because usually in
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  Catholicism, they don't encourage you to read the Bible at all. You know, in fact, if you
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  try to do so, they're like, no, no, no, no, no, put put that down. You know, let me tell
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  you what happened. Don't read that. Because if you read that, you're going to get confused
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  and you're going to get it wrong. So I'm going to tell you instead. And so we didn't read
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  it. And even at Sunday mass, you'd have these three selected choice passages read out, you
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  know, that would be interpreted by the priest. So in short, I really have no clue what's
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  actually in the Bible and what's not in the Bible. So I'm going to have some very basic
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  questions for you.
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  That's perfectly fine. Let's maybe begin with the Old Testament. I do realize it probably
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  happened in various different stages and historical contexts. But how and when were the Old Testament
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  books written or compiled into its current form?
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  So that's two different phases. And you're right that it covers along a very large chronological
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  window. Probably the earliest literary layers in the Bible are some fragments of poetry
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  that come in places like Judges 5 and Genesis 49 and Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 68, places like
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  that. And that poetry may go back to around 1000 BCE, but it would have initially been
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  transmitted either inscription or orally. You don't get historical narrative in the
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  Hebrew language until around 850-800 BCE. So a couple hundred years later, they start
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  using this language to write historical narrative. And shortly after this time period, we probably
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  have the original versions of some of the narratives that we know from the Hebrew Bible.
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  The Exodus tradition in some way, shape, or form probably began to circulate as text around
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  this time period. The stories about Jacob and the northern kingdom of Israel probably
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  start to circulate in textual form around this time period. In the eighth century, so
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  700 to 799 BCE, somewhere around there, we begin to have prophets writing down texts.
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  So these are the famous eight century prophets, or at least the historical parts of those
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  texts. So Isaiah and Micah and others like that are probably writing texts in the eighth
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  century. And then as we get into the seventh and the sixth centuries BCE, the focus shifts
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  from the northern kingdom of Israel to the southern kingdom of Judah. The northern kingdom
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  is actually destroyed by the kingdom of Assyria. And so focus shifts to the southern kingdom.
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  And this is where we begin to have folks like the Judahite king Josiah begins to take some
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  of the historical records that were probably being kept for the rulers of the nation, starts
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  to craft those into what we now know as the book of Deuteronomy. And we start to see some
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  law codes being written. And then we get the exile, where the Judahites are forcibly exiled
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  to Babylon, which starts around 600 BCE and goes to around 539 BCE. And then we have a
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  bunch of people coming back into Israel writing texts, Ezra, Nehemiah. We have more legal
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  texts, we have more royal propaganda. And then we get into the Greco-Roman period, and
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  we have wisdom literature. So Persian, Greco-Roman period, things like Job, things like Proverbs,
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  things like this begin to be written. And then probably the very last text that was
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  finished in what we now consider the Hebrew Bible is the Book of Daniel, which is supposed
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  to be set during the exile, but was actually probably mostly written between the Persian
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  and Greco-Roman periods and was probably finalized in the early 160s BCE. And so we got a bunch
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  of different genres of text written by a bunch of different people from prophets to priests
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  to kings to scribes, probably originating around 1000 BCE. And then the final texts
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  were probably composed in the middle of the second century BCE. And it's probably being
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  compiled around this time period as well. Some scholars today think that these were
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  not all widely available. Like your average person on the street probably had never read
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  any of these texts. They might have heard some of them, but certainly not most, much
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  less all of them. And it's probably around the time that Israel, well, the people of
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  Judea are able to defeat the Hellenistic Seleucid kingdom in battle and establish their own
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  kingdom that we call the Hasmonean kingdom in the middle of the second century BCE, probably
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  in an effort to try to enforce a shared identity and kind of draw boundaries around that identity.
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  They may have begun to share these texts more widely and enforce the legislation that is
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  in them. So you don't have widespread knowledge of these texts until probably the middle of
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  the second century BCE. And that's probably when the arrangement that we now know was
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  formalized. So long process. A lot of these texts that may originate between 1000 and
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  800 BCE have been edited and redacted numerous times over that whole process. So lots of
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  things have changed. But the text as we know it now probably compiled in the form more
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  or less as we know it now, probably in the early to mid second century BCE.
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  So a process that was spanning 800 years, different genres from poetry, like you said
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  to royal propaganda. Who had the idea, if we know anything about that, let's put all
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  of these very various narratives and different forms of texts into one.
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  We see this first in the idea of Ezra when they come back to, they're trying to reestablish
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  the temple and they're trying to get the people of Judea to follow God's law again. And so
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  we have the story in the book of Ezra, which was written somewhere between 400 and 300
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  BCE of Ezra reading out the whole book of the law to the people. And this is probably
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  not entirely historical, but any historical features of it probably would have just involved
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  what we now know as the Torah, the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, some of the
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  law codes in there, maybe. And the idea there seems to be that the people of Judea are trying
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  to distinguish themselves from the larger empires that are around them that have been
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  putting pressure on them and have been oppressing them. Since the Babylonian exile, then the
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  Persians were their overlords, then we had the Hellenistic period and we had the Seleucids
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  and the Ptolemies were fighting over control of the area. So they always had these other
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  nations that were putting a lot of pressure on them. And so in order to try to create
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  and defend an ethnic identity and keep the other identities away, they used this propaganda
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  and this legislation as a means of saying, here's what a good Judahite does. They don't
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  eat pork. They do these celebrations. They follow these rules. I don't know if you had
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  a situation like I did when I was growing up in my house, my dad used to say things
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  like, we're McClellans, we do this. And this is like the identity marker. This is how you
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  knew that you were part of the family. And it was always some aspirational thing. But
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  that's a way to say this is how we draw the line between us and them. And so it was probably
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  folks who were trying to create and curate that identity as a means of protecting their
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  ethnic identity, keeping them together as a group and saying, we are an ethnos, we are
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  an ethnic group. We want to ensure that we survive as an ethnic group. And so we need
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  to distinguish ourselves from everybody else around us. And so the indications are that
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  we probably see that beginning to happen as the Judahites are trying to survive in the
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  land of Judah after the exile. But it really comes to a head when the Judeans are fighting
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  off the Seleucid kingdom, which Antiochus IV Epiphanes is the king who seems determined,
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  according to the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees, to stamp out the Judahite culture, to be able
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  to prohibit them from circumcising their sons, to force them to eat pork, to do all this
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  kind of stuff. And so it's probably in that period, which is where we get the tradition
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  of the rededication of the temple, which is now enshrined in the celebration of Hanukkah.
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  That's probably the period where it all comes to a head and where they decide this is who
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  we're going to be. These are the texts that we're going to use to establish our identity.
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  And in terms of who, it's just going to be political leaders, cultic leaders, thought
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  leaders who are concerned not only for their ethnic identity and their ethnic group, but
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  also for their access to power and resources as leaders within that ethnic group. But in
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  terms of names, we don't really have a ton of names that we can identify.
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  But if it was first and foremost about establishing some sort of cultural identity, why didn't
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  they just articulate some sort of cultural norms? Why does it have to come from God?
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  Where does God feature in all of this?
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  So this probably has to do with the preservation of a much earlier ideology. In the pre-exilic
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  periods and into the second millennium BCE, every nation had its patron deity. And the
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  patron deity was the one who went out before you in battle to fight your battles for you.
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  And you won or lost based on your patron deity's feelings about you. We see this in a text
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  from a king of Moab named Mesha, one of our earliest examples, probably the earliest example
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  of historical narrative prose in an alphabetic script from this area. And Mesha talks about
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  kings of Israel and says that Chemosh, who was the patron deity of Moab, allowed the
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  king of Israel to oppress them, put them under vassalage, demand tribute, all that kind of
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  stuff. And then it explains it on the grounds that Chemosh was angry with his land. In other
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  words, they had done something wrong. They had made their patron deity upset. And so
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  their patron deity says, all right, I'm using this, I'm the puppet master, I'm using this
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  other nation, and I'm allowing them to oppress you to teach you a lesson. And we have the
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  exact same rationalizations going on in the Hebrew Bible. And so the deity is the one
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  constant. And you rationalize your successes or your losses based on the deity's basically
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  feelings about you. And so the exile was rationalized as God being angry with Israel because they
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  didn't keep the Sabbath day, because they were worshiping other gods, because they were
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  using idols, divine images. And then in a paper I published in 2018, I argue that Psalm
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  82 is an attempt to universalize God, because one of the features of this worldview is that
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  every nation's deity is only sovereign within that nation. And now all of the Judahites
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  are outside their nation. They can't access their God. Their God's way off in the land
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  of Israel and their way off in the land of Babylon. And so Psalm 82 is this very mythological
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  text where God stands amidst the gods in the divine council and renders judgment and accuses
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  the other gods of iniquity and then condemns them to mortality. And my argument is that
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  this is blaming the gods of the other nations for allowing this exile, condemning the gods
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  of the nations to mortality. And then the very last line of the Psalm is, rise up, O
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  God, you inherit all nations. And the idea is we've deposed the divine council. We've
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  gotten rid of all the patron deities. Now Adonai, the god of Israel, will become god
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  of all nations. And that way we can now access our deity in another nation, whether that's
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  Egypt or Babylon or wherever. And that's the universalization of the god of Israel. And
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  so the god of Israel has always been kind of their lodestar. This is the one who is
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  guiding us. This is the one who is directing us. And whereas other nations get destroyed
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  and that literature gets stopped, it gets cut off, it gets lost, and people develop
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  other identities and they use other literature, the literature of the Hebrew Bible is preserved
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  and is added onto. And so that scriptural heritage with that representation of Israel
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  and their patron deity that is now universalized is still there. And so that's what they're
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  going to use as their guide, as the compass for how they're going to understand their
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  direction as an ethnic group. And so a lot of people talk about the Bible being this
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  book unlike any other book, and therefore it's divine. And it is a book unlike any other
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  book because whereas all other nations at some point or another lost the heritage of
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  their authoritative literature, the societies that use the Bible still have it all. Not
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  all of it, but they still have much of it. And that scriptural heritage is always there
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  as the foundation of how they understand their relationship to each other as a nation and
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  to God. And so I think it's really historical accidents that results in them maintaining
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  this notion that we have this covenant relationship with God and our identities are wrapped up
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  in what God tells us to do. How utterly fascinating that the worldview at the time was that the
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  deity was kind of tied to the land. So the Egyptian gods could do their thing in the
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  land of Egypt, and then the Greek gods could do their thing in the territories of ancient
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  Greece because they were exiled, the Israelites, then they universalized and their God could
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  do his thing anywhere. That was how they tried to make sense of it so that they could preserve
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  that heritage and that identity. And you see that reflected in a bunch of different ways.
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  For instance, in some of the laws in Leviticus, it talks about you will do this so that you
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  can stay in the land. The nations that were in this land before you, I drove them out
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  because they didn't do these things. And God is kind of saying, what I care about is this
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  land. And so if you want to stay in the land, you're going to do what I tell you to do so
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  that the land remains pure. And you have, there's a story in the books of Kings about
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  a Syrian general named Naaman who comes down and he's healed by Elisha in the River Jordan.
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  And he says, when I go back to Syria and I'm in the temple of my master, I want to worship
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  Adonai, the God of Israel. And so he takes two cartloads of Israelite soil back with
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  him. Basically saying, I want to worship the God that can only be worshiped on Israelite
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  soil. So I'm going to take a chunk of Israel with me so that I can do that. The idea being
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  that deity is the only accessible on Israelite soil. And there are a bunch of other ways
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  that that's reflected. But yeah, I think it's absolutely fascinating and it gets preserved
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  in a lot of different ways with this idea of this elect people that originally is associated
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  with the land that is represented as the real elect part.
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  Do we know anything about how Yahweh, I think you said Adonai, the God of the Israelites,
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  first came into being, so to speak? I read somewhere that in the beginning he was some
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  sort of a storm god. Maybe I have it wrong. One of the many gods worshiped in the Bronze
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  Age near East. Is there any truth to that?
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  Absolutely. The first evidence we have of any people group named Israel comes from something
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  called the Merneptah Stele, which is a 10-foot victory stele from Egypt that dates to around
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  1208-1210 BCE. And on it, it says, it talks about these campaigns that the king has done,
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  and it talks about some areas in Canaan. And then it says Israel's seed is not and that
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  they've been laid waste. And so this is the first reference to Israel. And there's a determinative.
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  In Egyptian, you have to classify what type of noun this is. And the determinative identifies
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  Israel as a people, not as a kingdom, not as a city-state, not even as a city, but as
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  a people. And so this is taken as evidence of the existence of this group known as Israel.
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  But Israel means El Contends. And El is the Northwest Semitic patriarchal high deity.
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  So this is long beard, older deity, sits in a throne, rules, but is also benevolent and
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  compassionate. We don't have any evidence of any deity named Adonai, YHWH, the Tetragrammaton,
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  at all in any other nation around Israel until the Mesha inscription, which we already talked
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  about, where Mesha boasts about defeating Israel at Nebo and carting off the vessels
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  of Adonai. So by around 850, 825 BCE, Adonai seems to be the patron deity of Israel, but
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  there's no record, there's no evidence of Adonai anytime before that period. We have
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  a couple of other inscriptions, date to around the same time period as the inscription of
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  Mesha, one's called the Tel Dan Stele or inscription. And there we have reference to some kings
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  that an Aramaic name Hazael defeated and they have Yahwistic theophoric elements in their
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  name. So their names include references to Adonai. So like my name is Daniel, Donnie
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  El, my judge is El. So that would be the theophoric element. And then we have this black obelisk
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  of Shalmaneser III, which refers to Jehu, which is also thought to have a Yahwistic
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  theophoric element. And so the kings in this time period have Adonai's name in their names.
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  So sometime between 1200-ish BCE and about 850 BCE, the main deity shifts from El, the
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  patriarchal high deity, to Adonai. And if you look in the earliest layers of the Hebrew
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  Bible you see two things. You see Adonai confronting Baal, another deity from this region. There's
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  a lot of conflict between Adonai and Baal. And you see Adonai being represented in the
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  same terms as Baal, as a youthful warrior storm deity. So these are two different divine
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  profiles within the Northwest Semitic pantheon. The patriarch, the aged, wise, benevolent
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  patriarchal high deity, and the angry, youthful warrior storm deity. And so what a lot of
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  scholars think is that a group of people, perhaps associated with some people group
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  that are referred to by the Egyptians as the Shasu, probably migrated into the region of
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  the northern hill country around 1100-1000 BCE and brought with them their deity, who
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  was probably named Adonai. And this deity, at some point somebody probably either rose
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  to the throne, became king, someone who was a follower, a devotee of Adonai, or someone
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  who was king decided to adopt devotion to Adonai. And then they decided to engage in
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  a campaign of conflation, where they would say Adonai and El are the same deity. And
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  this is not unheard of, we see this occurring in the literature around this time and this
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  place where you have combined divine names. But for this one, they just said, no, they're
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  the same deity, and we're going to refer to them as Adonai Elohim, or something like that.
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  So names like Joel mean Adonai is El. And so that would seem to be an attempt to assert
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  that these two are the same deity. By the time we begin to see biblical texts arising
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  and references to the patron deity of Israel, this campaign of conflation has probably already
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  been completed, or at least mostly completed. But there's probably one text in the Hebrew
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  Bible that might preserve an early distinction of the two. Deuteronomy 32 is one of these
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  early, well, the poem itself is not incredibly early, but it seems to preserve some very
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  early things. And it says in Deuteronomy 32-7, it talks about Israel's relationship with
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  Adonai. And then it says, ask your forefathers and they will tell you, ask your fathers and
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  they will say, it goes on to say, when the Most High, which is a title for the high deity,
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  divided up the nations, he divided the peoples according to the number of the children of
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  God. And Adonai's portion was his people, Jacob, his share of the inheritance. And so
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  some scholars suggest that, and I would agree with them, that what this text seems to be
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  saying is that Adonai is the patron deity of Israel because they received Israel as
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  an inheritance from another deity, from the Most High. And if we understand Elyon, the
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  Most High, to be identified with El, the patriarchal high deity, then that would make sense of
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  this likely initial relationship that Adonai comes into the pantheon as the storm deity
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  who is one of the children of the Most High God. And so the Most High God gave Adonai
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  Israel as their inheritance and this may pre-exist that conflation of the two deities. And so,
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  yeah, as you look throughout the Hebrew Bible, you can see these two different divine profiles
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  popping up in different places. Sometimes God is this aged, white-bearded, benevolent
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  high deity sitting on a throne and sometimes it is this youthful warrior who rides the
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  storm clouds as their chariot and is associated with the lightning and the thunder. And those
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  would be the profiles that were originally associated with the high deity El and with
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  the storm deity Baal.
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  And what's the relationship between these two? Are they part of the same family, father
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  and son, or like you don't know anything about that?
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  We have an idea, but it's not consistent. There are these texts that we call the Ugaritic
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  texts that were discovered in a town that we call Ugarit, which is near the coast and
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  further north in Syria. But these are texts that were written between around 1500 and
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  1200 BCE. The city was destroyed right around the time that we first have our first evidence
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  of the existence of Israel. But these texts are written in a language very closely related
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  to Hebrew and they talk about a lot of the same characters. They talk about El, they
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  talk about Leviathan, they talk about Baal. They have a lot of the same mythologies. And
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  so in those texts, Baal is represented as either the son of El, he refers to El as his
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  father in several places, but is also sometimes referred to as the offspring of another deity
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  called Dagon, which probably comes from the Amorite pantheon. So it gets complex, but
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  basically they represented their deities in a variety of different ways. Whatever was
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  rhetorically useful, that's how they represented their deity. But Baal is probably understood
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  within the Israelite understanding pantheon to be an alternative version of Adonai as
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  one of the offspring, one of the children or sons of El. And Asherah. So Athirat is
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  the name of El's consort, partner, or wife. In the Hebrew Bible it's Asherah. And scholars
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  think that in the earliest periods of Israel, Asherah was worshipped as God's wife. And
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  we have iconography, we have inscriptions, we have a bunch of things that indicate God
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  was thought to have a wife in the earliest periods of Israel's history.
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  A lot of the books of the Old Testament are purported to tell the history of the Israelites.
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  We got personalities, we got King David, King Solomon, various famous prophets and nation
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  builders, et cetera. When were these figures, and maybe let's stick with King David supposed
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  to live? And is there any archaeological evidence testifying to the existence of any of these
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  figures?
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  So King David is right around the year 1000 BCE. And the earliest kind of evidence that
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  we have for the existence of a historical David is that Tel Dan Stele I mentioned earlier.
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  Because I mentioned that Havazel boasts about having defeated some Israelite kings. And
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  then he mentions the name of a Judahite ruler and says that they're of the house of David,
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  Ba'it Tawid. And so this is not a kingdom. It's not mentioned as a kingdom or a nation
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  or anything like that. It's mentioned more as kind of a dynasty. And so this is interpreted
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  by most scholars as evidence that at least 150 years after David was supposed to have
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  lived, they knew about some kind of dynasty known as the house of David. And so that may
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  be indirect historical evidence that somebody named David established a dynasty in the southern
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  area of Judah around Jerusalem. And so some scholars reconstruct the start of the kingdom
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  of Judah as maybe David tried to take over the throne from Saul in Israel and failed.
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  And so went down south and took over Jerusalem and started up his own little chiefdom down
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  there. And that turned into the kingdom of Judah and he became King David. But initially
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  it was just a dynastic house. So that's the earliest evidence that we have for any kind
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  of historicity that we might attribute to the historical timeline there. Now I mentioned
• 30:09
  some Israelite kings. I mentioned Moab mentioned some Israelite kings. The Black Obelisk of
• 30:15
  Shalmaneser, the third mentions Jehu. So that's where we first get independent attestation
• 30:22
  of people mentioned in the Bible contemporary with the people themselves. So that would
• 30:29
  be the earliest direct evidence for their existence. And so it's right around that time
• 30:35
  period between 850 and 800 BCE that we begin to see direct historical attestation of these
• 30:43
  figures. And so what I normally say is more or less roughly around the time period of
• 30:50
  David the text is going to be in very broad strokes accurate in terms of whose ruling
• 30:57
  where that there probably was a Solomon of some kind. It was not a gigantic kingdom that
• 31:07
  put to shame everybody around them. It was probably a little chiefdom. But we get folks
• 31:13
  like Jeroboam and Rehoboam and the Omride dynasty and Jehu and Hazael and all these
• 31:19
  other folks. And those are probably historical figures. Now all the stories that are being
• 31:24
  told about them, particularly that involves supernatural events, we have no data that
• 31:29
  support their historicity and particularly where they conflict. But in terms of the names
• 31:37
  of rulers of nations that begins to be historically accurate right there in the ninth century
• 31:43
  BCE. And most scholars would say that some of the early prophetic literature was probably
• 31:49
  written by people who were itinerant prophets who went around condemning the wealthy and
• 31:55
  the privileged for their oppression of the poor and the needy. So a handful of chapters
• 32:03
  in the first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah are attributed to a historical Isaiah who
• 32:09
  lived in the eighth century BCE. And Hosea and Micah and Amos and others are examples
• 32:15
  of other prophetic figures that scholars think probably existed and preached around that
• 32:19
  time period as well.
• 32:21
  That's more than I would have thought. I thought none of these folks actually existed. So a
• 32:25
  little bit of props there to the Old Testament.
• 32:28
  Yeah, when we look at the Pentateuch, when we look at Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Judges,
• 32:34
  that's all very much not supported by any data.
• 32:37
  Okay, that was my next question actually about the Exodus, one of the most obviously striking
• 32:43
  and famous stories of the Old Testament, Moses leading the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery.
• 32:48
  Do Egyptian records confirm the historicity of this narrative at all or at least a portion
• 32:54
  of it? What about...
• 32:55
  Not at all.
• 32:56
  Okay.
• 32:57
  Not even a little bit.
• 32:58
  I'm going to go lowest common kind of denominator. Were there Jewish slaves in Egypt at all at
• 33:04
  any point?
• 33:05
  We have to be a little pedantic here. Jewish is a designation that wouldn't have existed
• 33:10
  at that time period. We probably can't speak of Jewish until we get down to second century
• 33:14
  BCE. However, their ancestry, maybe. There were certainly Semitic peoples who were enslaved
• 33:24
  by the nation of Egypt and in Egypt. And there were actually Semitic peoples who ruled Egypt
• 33:28
  for a time known as the Hyksos. So there was always influence back and forth between Egypt
• 33:39
  and Semitic peoples and they referred to them as the Asiatics in the Egyptian text. We have
• 33:45
  absolutely no data whatsoever that indicate anyone from the northern hill country of Israel
• 33:51
  had been enslaved in Egypt and escaped. However, there are some theories that this tradition
• 33:58
  about this escape from slavery might be rooted in some kind of historical kernel where maybe
• 34:04
  a small group of people escaped and came back and started telling their story. And over
• 34:10
  the centuries, the fish just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And it turned into what
• 34:14
  we have now. There's one scholar whose theory is that the tribe of Levi, the Levites, that
• 34:23
  was the tribe that escaped out of Egypt and made their way. And they're the ones who preserved
• 34:29
  the story and they're the ones who passed it on. So that's one theory. Other scholars
• 34:33
  think that it originates in a social memory about a group escaping from slavery within
• 34:40
  the northern hill country itself. They didn't run off from another nation. They were enslaved
• 34:44
  by their neighbors. And the story just, again, grew and grew and grew into what we have now.
• 34:50
  But those are rather speculative reconstructions of what's going on. They're plausible, but
• 34:59
  we don't have enough data to be able to say one way or another they did or didn't happen.
• 35:04
  And that's part of the academic endeavor. We got to try and take some steps in the dark
• 35:10
  from time to time and then see if maybe we discover data that allows us to confirm or
• 35:16
  deny any of these things. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. This is going to be a tough one. Okay.
• 35:22
  What kind of morality is the Old Testament trying to relay or to teach its readers, if
• 35:30
  that is its purpose at all? I don't think that's its main purpose. I think we have some
• 35:36
  moralizing literature and parts of the Hebrew Bible, but I think it's coming together primarily
• 35:42
  to structure power, to serve the interests of the palace and the temple and things like
• 35:48
  that. But we certainly have moralizing literature in the Proverbs. And we have some contemplation
• 35:56
  of the problem of evil going on in Job and Ecclesiastes and places like that. But when
• 36:02
  it comes to morality, I think it's changing over time. But for instance, in the book of
• 36:10
  Leviticus, we have what's known as the holiness code, which is a portion of the priestly
• 36:17
  literature, which was probably composed by people who either were priests or wish they
• 36:22
  were priests who were very concerned for ritual purity. And so all of their concern, and some
• 36:31
  of this leaks into the other literature as well, is for ensuring that the people of Israel
• 36:38
  remain ritually pure. And so they come up with all these laws about what kinds of things
• 36:43
  create ritual impurities, and then they try to prohibit a lot of those. And so that's
• 36:50
  the only place where we see, for instance, the reference to any kind of same-sex intercourse
• 36:56
  is in the holiness code, which is a very late literary layer that is basically trying to
• 37:04
  say, hey, we want this land to be pure so we don't get kicked out of it again. And so
• 37:09
  we're going to make up all these rules. So that's guiding some of the morality. Some
• 37:14
  of the other morality is just associated with trying to distinguish us from them. So there's
• 37:20
  a scholar named David Graeber who in a recent book talks about schismogenesis, where you
• 37:28
  define your identity by identifying what's different from how you're different from your
• 37:34
  neighbor, and then that becomes your main identity marker. And so we see some of that
• 37:41
  as well. So things like avoiding pork, things like sanctifying the Sabbath day and not working
• 37:48
  on the Sabbath, things like that become kind of the way you show everybody around you that
• 37:55
  you belong to that identity and demonstrate your distinction from everybody else. So a
• 38:01
  lot of it has to do with a more collective kind of insular identity politics. But I think
• 38:08
  when we look throughout the Bible, we see a lot of different moral frameworks. We see
• 38:11
  a lot of different ways of approaching morality and identity, but a lot of it is boiling down
• 38:19
  to either structuring power and values and boundaries or trying to prove to everybody
• 38:27
  else that you are a believing and you are a faithful member of the community. So a lot
• 38:34
  of it has to do with identity politics.
• 38:36
  Does the afterlife feature in the Old Testament in any form? And if it does, how does it differ
• 38:42
  from the Christian concept of heaven?
• 38:47
  There are a lot of folks who would say there's no afterlife within the Hebrew Bible. I don't
• 38:51
  think that's accurate. And I think the consensus view disagrees with that. And we
• 38:57
  have a couple of different ways to establish this. One is with a lot of references to Sha'ol.
• 39:03
  Sha'ol is the abode of all of the dead in the Hebrew Bible. And throughout the overwhelming
• 39:08
  majority of the Hebrew Bible, everybody goes to Sha'ol. Good, bad, everywhere in between.
• 39:15
  Everyone ends up in Sha'ol.
• 39:17
  That's not very fair.
• 39:20
  Well that's what ultimately ends up giving rise to the concepts of post-mortem divine
• 39:27
  punishment and reward in the Greco-Roman period. But in the Hebrew Bible, it's kind of a murky
• 39:34
  existence. Nobody's sure exactly what it's going to look like, what kind of sociality
• 39:38
  was there. It's just understood to be kind of a gloomy place. However, from material
• 39:44
  remains particularly how people were buried, how people were interacted with after their
• 39:51
  death because you still have meals that are shared with the deceased. You have what are
• 39:56
  called mortuary chapels where the living can go interact with the deceased. You have petitions
• 40:04
  that are made to the deceased. And even in the Hebrew Bible, you have things like Saul
• 40:08
  going to the necromancer of Aindor to consult with the deceased prophet Samuel, who is
• 40:14
  called an Elohim, a god, when he shows up.
• 40:18
  And so there's a whole cult of the dead. And there's a wonderful book written by Keri
• 40:26
  Sonia a couple years ago called Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel, which is all about
• 40:31
  how the Hebrew Bible and the material remains outline what they thought about the dead and
• 40:37
  their relationship with them.
• 40:40
  But the dead were thought to have access to strategic knowledge. You could go petition
• 40:45
  them to help you with something, make a decision about something. You could petition them to
• 40:51
  harass your neighbor who isn't returning your power tools and things like that. And you
• 40:57
  shared meals with them. And so there was probably ancestor worship going on alongside worship
• 41:02
  of God's wife and God and other deities in the earliest periods of Israel. And there's
• 41:07
  an argument to make, and I think a scholar named Susan Ackerman made it once in print,
• 41:11
  that one of the things that this King Josiah, who's probably responsible for the earliest
• 41:16
  layers of Deuteronomy, was trying to do was put a stop to all this other worship that
• 41:20
  was going on, not because he thought it wasn't legitimate worship, but because he wanted
• 41:26
  everybody to come to his temple to worship.
• 41:30
  So it's all about the Benjamins, even 2,700 years ago. And so there was worship of the
• 41:38
  ancestors. And that was probably, Deuteronomy was probably the initial volley trying to
• 41:43
  get rid of worship of the ancestors. And so we don't really know what all is going on
• 41:49
  with the afterlife. It's murky. It's unclear. It probably wasn't a great time. There are
• 41:56
  different entities that were thought to occupy the land of the dead, the Rephaim, the Yodeim.
• 42:05
  There are a bunch of entities that were thought to be there that they probably thought were
• 42:09
  dangerous to some degree. People are buried with what are called apotropaic amulets and
• 42:14
  things like that. Apotropaic means it wards off evil. So people carried those things around
• 42:19
  in life and would be buried with them to ward off whatever spookums might be in the afterlife.
• 42:26
  And what happens in the Greco-Roman period, I mentioned they're changing their worldview
• 42:32
  based on the fact that they seem to always be under the boot of larger empires. And as
• 42:37
  they're contemplating the problem of evil, why good things happen to bad people, why
• 42:41
  bad things happen to good people, they're not seeing the other shoe drop in life. And
• 42:49
  so the thought becomes, well, maybe it's after this life that God will finally settle the
• 42:58
  score and make everything right. And so in the Enochic literature, texts like First Enoch
• 43:03
  and related texts that were written in Aramaic and Greek in the Greco-Roman period Judaism,
• 43:09
  you have the development of this idea of these wicked angels that are being punished by God.
• 43:14
  And oh yeah, all the very wicked people in the world are being punished by God as well.
• 43:20
  And then the righteous people, which is always us, they are being rewarded in the afterlife.
• 43:26
  We've suffered so much in life, God is going to reward us in the afterlife. And it's not
• 43:31
  systematic, it's not consistent. But by the time we get to the New Testament, you have
• 43:36
  three general ideas of a post-mortem divine punishment, annihilationism, where they just
• 43:41
  cease to exist. There's temporary conscious torment followed either by salvation or annihilation.
• 43:49
  So there were different ideas about what happened after that initial phase of divine punishment.
• 43:54
  And then there's eternal conscious torment. And the New Testament seems to represent to
• 44:00
  some degree or another all three different categories, but it's after purgatory kind
• 44:04
  of thing. Something like that. Yeah. And this is associated with this idea of... I forget
• 44:13
  the word, apocastase. Shoot, that's not the word. But there's this idea that you go and
• 44:20
  you get punished until you've paid your debt to God and then you are purified or whatever.
• 44:28
  And some of that is in Gnostic ideology. Some people think Paul was a bit of a universalist,
• 44:34
  because Paul seems to say, like in 2 Corinthians, there's somebody in their community who is
• 44:41
  sleeping with their father's wife or something like that. And Paul says to cut him off, deliver
• 44:48
  him to the buffettings of Satan so that his soul can be saved in the last day. Which seems
• 44:55
  to suggest that Satan is there to punish temporarily so that people can then be saved, which might
• 45:03
  be a universalist position. So all kinds of different perspectives on that are still developing
• 45:10
  in the New Testament. And it's really early Christianity that finally unifies it all and
• 45:17
  creates kind of a systematic notion of post-mortem divine reward and punishment. But even that
• 45:22
  is further developed in the medieval period. Dante and others further add to the rich tapestry
• 45:31
  of all the different things that happen after death.
• 45:34
  Okay, since we started talking about it, let's move on to the New Testament a little bit.
• 45:39
  We have the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John discussing the life and teachings
• 45:44
  of Jesus. And then I believe we have the epistles and then the book of Revelation. But the first
• 45:49
  thing I want to know is, did any of the four evangelists actually hang out with Jesus at
• 45:55
  any point?
• 45:57
  The data don't indicate that. And the scholarly consensus is that, well, one, the gospels
• 46:03
  were initially written and circulated anonymously. Most scholars think that the names Matthew,
• 46:09
  Mark, Luke and John became associated with the gospels decades after their initial composition.
• 46:15
  But two, none of the authors of those gospels are thought to have been eyewitnesses. Some
• 46:20
  of them explicitly so. Like Luke explicitly says, I had to go look up the sources to try
• 46:26
  to put this together. But the scholarly consensus is that these were not eyewitnesses to the
• 46:34
  events that they're narrating.
• 46:37
  I believe the earliest gospel is the gospel of Mark, right? When was it written? How long
• 46:43
  after Jesus's death?
• 46:46
  I think most scholars would say this was probably written between around 68 or 69 CE and 70,
• 46:53
  71, 72 CE. So we're talking 35 to 40 years after the death of Jesus.
• 47:03
  So the four gospels are basically telling the same story, right? But however, there
• 47:07
  are noticeable differences in the four narratives. You know probably better than anybody else,
• 47:13
  but there are some inconsistencies there, right? Between the four gospels. What are
• 47:20
  some of the most glaring or obvious ones that maybe are not easily resolved?
• 47:26
  So three of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called synoptic. The synoptic gospels,
• 47:32
  which means see together because they more or less follow the same narrative timeline.
• 47:40
  But within them, there are significant differences. For instance, the story of Jesus's birth,
• 47:45
  the nativity story in Matthew is very specific. And then the one in Luke is entirely different.
• 47:56
  Matthew, they're in Bethlehem, give birth. They've got to, now I'm mixing up Matthew
• 48:04
  and Luke. But in Luke, there's a census and they're living in Nazareth. They have to come
• 48:11
  down to Bethlehem and then they go back to Nazareth. And Matthew, they have to go into
• 48:17
  Egypt to escape from Herod. And the biggest problem is that the timelines don't fit because
• 48:26
  the census that Luke says drove them or caused them to go down to Bethlehem to be registered,
• 48:33
  that didn't happen until 6 CE, 10 years after Herod died. And so the one in Matthew is placing
• 48:42
  this in the days of Herod because Herod is the one who tries to kill everybody and tries
• 48:48
  to stop the king of the Jews from surviving. So I would say the nativities are just wildly
• 49:01
  contradictory between Matthew and Luke. And there are scholars who argue that they're
• 49:05
  not even original to Matthew and Luke. Luke, for instance, the nativity story is using
• 49:10
  very different Greek from the rest of the Gospel of Luke. And none of that story is
• 49:15
  ever mentioned ever again in Luke. And also Luke chapter 3 begins how we would expect
• 49:21
  the Gospel to begin. It's like in the days of this emperor, this person was governor,
• 49:26
  this is where we're laying our scene, so to speak. And so there's a case to make that
• 49:31
  the nativity scene that we see in Luke was something somebody else just added to the
• 49:35
  text after it had been written. So within the Synoptic Gospels, I would say that's
• 49:39
  probably the most glaring contradiction. Mark doesn't even mention it. Mark starts at Jesus'
• 49:46
  baptism. But then John is all on its own because it's telling a very different story. It refers
• 49:52
  to some of the same events, but the Synoptic Gospels represent Jesus' ministry as being
• 49:58
  about one year. He is baptized around a year later. He's crucified and then resurrects.
• 50:07
  John represents a three-year ministry where Jesus is going back and forth between Jerusalem
• 50:13
  and Galilee multiple times. And so just the timeline between the two is different. But
• 50:21
  then the Gospel of John also represents some of these events according to very different
• 50:27
  timelines. When Jesus did his cleansing of the temple is different between the Synoptics
• 50:33
  and John. When Jesus was anointed by this woman is different time periods between the
• 50:43
  Synoptics and John. So the biggest differences would be between the Synoptics and John, but
• 50:47
  even within the Synoptics there are pretty big differences as well.
• 50:52
  And John was written the latest, right?
• 50:56
  Maybe. Most people would say John was written probably in the 90s CE, but more and more
• 51:00
  scholars these days are suggesting that the Gospel of Luke may actually have been written
• 51:05
  in the second century CE. So maybe Luke is the latest. But that's an ongoing debate.
• 51:14
  I really wanted to ask you the following. What are some of the common misconceptions
• 51:19
  about the New Testament and perhaps especially about what Jesus said or did that perhaps
• 51:25
  we think is in there, but it's actually not or vice versa?
• 51:32
  There are a lot of sayings that are actually not anywhere in the text. They're like close
• 51:39
  to what might be in the text, but ideas about the Golden Rule are usually quoting other
• 51:47
  poetry or literature, not the Bible. But I think one of the biggest misconceptions is
• 51:52
  that the Gospels preserve the actual literal words of Jesus, which is almost certainly
• 51:59
  not true. To begin, the Gospels were all composed originally in Greek. So even if we do think
• 52:05
  something originally came from Jesus, we're only getting it in translation. We would have
• 52:10
  to revert back to Aramaic to see what Jesus might have said. And there are a bunch of
• 52:15
  different ways that that could be done. But there are some things that very clearly are
• 52:20
  not translation, can't be translation, but must be original compositions in Greek. For
• 52:27
  instance, there are quotations of the Hebrew Bible that are put into the mouths of people
• 52:32
  speaking Aramaic, but they're directly quoting the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible,
• 52:38
  which is different from the Hebrew. And they're quoting the message that they're trying to
• 52:44
  deliver only exists in the Greek translation. For instance, there is the Council at Jerusalem,
• 52:53
  which happens in the book of Acts. And this is after the death, resurrection, and ascension
• 52:58
  of Jesus. They're getting together to try to decide, are we going to require Gentiles
• 53:02
  who become Christians to be circumcised and to have to accept all of these rules that
• 53:08
  Jewish people culturally follow? And they decide that's not going to be the case. And
• 53:15
  the last person to speak is James, Jesus' brother. And he says, I like this, this agrees
• 53:22
  with what was spoken by the prophets. And he quotes a passage from Amos, but he misquotes
• 53:29
  it's not what's in the Hebrew, it's what's in the Greek mistranslation. Because the Hebrew
• 53:35
  says, and we will repossess the remnant of Edom, basically saying we're going to reconquer
• 53:44
  the territory that we had under the kingdom of David, we're going to repossess all of
• 53:49
  this territory. But the verb repossess was misunderstood as a verb that looks very similar
• 53:55
  in Hebrew, the verb for seek. And then the word Edom is spelled very close to the word
• 54:01
  Adam, which means people or human. And so when you look in Acts 15, what James quotes
• 54:09
  is, and the remnant of humanity will seek after the Lord. And the tent and you know,
• 54:16
  this tabernacle of David will be will be rebuilt. The idea being that all of humanity will seek
• 54:24
  after the Lord. And so we need to extend the gospel to all of humanity. But that whole
• 54:30
  message only exists in the Greek mistranslation. It's not in the Hebrew, which means this cannot
• 54:37
  be a verbatim account of what James would have said to this council in Jerusalem in
• 54:44
  Aramaic. It can only be something composed in Greek. And so that's an example of one
• 54:49
  way where we can see this is not historical because this is something that's only working
• 54:54
  in Greek. And there are other more arguable examples of similar things going on with Jesus,
• 55:00
  where Jesus is saying stuff that only makes sense in Greek, not in Aramaic or in Hebrew.
• 55:08
  I recently watched The Sound of Music again. I love that movie. Great. And in it, the fantastic
• 55:14
  movie and in it, the sort of the main nun says, you know, when I don't know if she says
• 55:21
  Jesus or God, when God closes the doors, he opens the window. Is that in the Bible?
• 55:27
  No, that's not in the Bible. I know one that for whatever reasons I keep seeing it, I think
• 55:34
  it has a lot to do with the toxic masculinity of Christian nationalism. But the idea of
• 55:41
  the lamb and the lion laying down together, like in that day, everything will be peaceful,
• 55:46
  the lion and the lamb. That doesn't occur anywhere in the Bible. It's the lamb and the
• 55:51
  wolf. But there are a lot of people with bumper stickers that say lions, not sheep. In the
• 55:57
  US, a bunch of toxic masculinity going on, and they would really like it to be about
• 56:03
  lions. But that's actually that's one of those kind of false memories that has just proliferated
• 56:14
  because people remember it that way. And it's not anywhere in the text.
• 56:20
  This is a biggie. Does Jesus ever explicitly proclaim himself the son of God anywhere?
• 56:29
  I would argue no. And I know it's this is not the consensus view. But I think it's a
• 56:34
  growing view. And I know a lot of critical scholars who would agree with me. But Jesus
• 56:40
  asserts, Jesus does things that only God is supposed to be able to do. And Jesus identifies
• 56:47
  with titles that are titles explicitly of God in the Hebrew Bible. And some people will
• 56:54
  argue, okay, in doing those two things, Jesus is showing that he is God. I and many other
• 57:00
  critical scholars would say, no, Jesus is doing what other mediatory figures did in
• 57:05
  Greco-Roman period Judaism, only he's being more forceful about it. They're showing that
• 57:10
  they have been given, they have been endowed with divine authority, and even with the ability
• 57:17
  to manifest the divine presence by virtue of possessing the divine name. And so Jesus
• 57:26
  is only doing what other mediatory figures before him within Greco-Roman period Judaism,
• 57:32
  the angel Yahoel, Melchizedek, the son of man in the Anakic literature, others do what
• 57:41
  God does, bear God's titles and are even receiving worship, because they are the special mediatory
• 57:48
  figure. And so Jesus is doing the same thing. And so I think the idea for the authors of
• 57:54
  the New Testament is, hey, Jesus is this mediatory figure. And I argue, in my own book, Adonized
• 58:01
  Divine Images, which is an open access book that's freely available online, that this
• 58:06
  is basically representing Jesus as a divine image, because a divine image is supposed
• 58:12
  to manifest the divine presence so that you can do whatever you need to do in God's presence,
• 58:18
  but it's not the God, but it can be referred to as if it's the God. So Jesus is functioning,
• 58:25
  in my opinion, in the exact same way, and we actually see the angel of the Lord functioning
• 58:29
  in this exact same way in the Hebrew Bible. So I go into a lot more detail about that
• 58:34
  argument in my book, and I'm going to be working on a forthcoming book that will lay that whole
• 58:40
  argument out about early Christology. But explicitly saying, I am God, no, Jesus never
• 58:45
  does that.
• 58:46
  So there is one in your... Right, please go ahead.
• 58:50
  There is one figure who says, I am God, who is not God, in the Bible, and that's the angel
• 58:55
  of the Lord. In Exodus 3, Moses sees the burning bush, turns aside, and it says that the angel
• 59:03
  of the Lord appeared to him in the flame of fire in the midst of the bush. And then that
• 59:07
  angel in verse 6 says, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac,
• 59:14
  the God of Jacob. So that is a figure that is not God, that explicitly says, I am God.
• 59:21
  Jesus, by the time of Jesus, the tradition of these intermediary figures is a little
• 59:27
  more nuanced. And so they kind of wink at you and say, ooh, I have the divine name,
• 59:32
  and that kind of stuff. And so that's what Jesus does. But Jesus never is as explicit
• 59:38
  as the angel of the Lord is in Exodus 3, 6.
• 59:43
  So if I understood correctly, not even is Jesus not saying, I am God, not even before
• 59:49
  evangelists were saying that he is God.
• 59:53
  No, we do have in John 20, 28, we have the doubting Thomas who says, my Lord and my God
• 1:00:01
  to Jesus. Now, what I argue is going on here is that Jesus earlier in the Gospel of John,
• 1:00:09
  in fact in John 1, 18, we have this statement, the only son who is at the side of God, he
• 1:00:17
  manifests God, or something like that. And the idea in the Gospel of John that the disciples
• 1:00:23
  don't get until the very end is, if you see me, you have seen God, exactly as a divine
• 1:00:30
  image works. I manifest the divine presence. And so if you see me, you have seen God. And
• 1:00:35
  so I argue that Thomas, in John 20, 28, when Thomas says to Jesus, my Lord and my God,
• 1:00:42
  Thomas gets it. The light bulb comes on and Thomas realizes, ah, you are the manifestation
• 1:00:49
  of God's presence. And so in that sense, calls Jesus God, but not quite in the sense of Jesus
• 1:01:00
  actually is God, more like Jesus is like a divine image who manifests God's presence.
• 1:01:05
  Okay, does Jesus in any of the four Gospels ever say anything about homosexuality?
• 1:01:12
  No. And there are people who point to Matthew 19 and say, well, Jesus quoted Genesis 2,
• 1:01:20
  24, and Jesus said that, you know, what God has put together, let no man divide asunder.
• 1:01:27
  And so Jesus is, you know, defining marriages between one man and one woman. And so that
• 1:01:33
  is against homosexuality. And that is a very creative, but very nonsensical overinterpretation
• 1:01:40
  of what Jesus is saying, because Jesus is just talking about divorce. And is quoting
• 1:01:44
  Genesis 2, 24 to say, God wants these pair bonds, and so don't break those bonds because
• 1:01:53
  God wants them. So that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality. But there's
• 1:02:00
  also the question of what we mean precisely by homosexuality, because if we're talking
• 1:02:04
  about a sexual orientation, attraction to the opposite sex, they had no concept of a
• 1:02:11
  sexual orientation in the ancient world that has absolutely anything to do with how we
• 1:02:16
  understand that concept today. So if we use homosexuality to mean the orientation, the
• 1:02:21
  Bible never says anything at all about it. If we use it to refer to the act of same sex
• 1:02:27
  intercourse, we have some references in Leviticus 18, Leviticus 20, in Romans 1, in 1 Corinthians
• 1:02:33
  6, and in 1 Timothy, specifically about the act. But they're represented in different
• 1:02:39
  ways. None of them is Jesus talking. They're represented in different ways, and they're
• 1:02:44
  rationalized according to wildly outdated and irrelevant worldviews and notions of what
• 1:02:52
  exactly is the problem with these kinds of actions. So the notion that everything can
• 1:02:57
  just be wholesale transferred to today and just overlaid on our notion of homosexuality
• 1:03:06
  and homosexual relationships today is wildly problematic, and I would argue is just based
• 1:03:13
  in the desire to structure power and values and boundaries. And unfortunately, it is a
• 1:03:18
  matter of life and death for some people, but some people cannot be made to care.
• 1:03:24
  Well said. Does Jesus talk about hell?
• 1:03:28
  Jesus does mention Gehenna, which is one of the three words that we see in the New Testament
• 1:03:34
  that are sometimes translated hell. Gehenna and Hades are the two main ones, and then
• 1:03:38
  one that only occurs once, and one of the epistles of Peter is Tartarus. But Jesus does
• 1:03:43
  talk about Gehenna, Hades, and Jesus talks about post-mortem divine punishment. And so
• 1:03:52
  it's actually in the Gospels where you get most of the occurrences. You'll recall I mentioned
• 1:03:57
  that in the New Testament we have those three different ideas about post-mortem divine punishment.
• 1:04:02
  It's actually in the mouth of Jesus that we get the most common references to the idea
• 1:04:08
  of eternal conscious torment. But it's also inconsistent. Jesus seems to be representing
• 1:04:16
  a few different perspectives.
• 1:04:18
  Now, if we take Bible as a whole, is there anything you could think of in there that
• 1:04:25
  is kind of freaky in the sense that it's mentioned in there, but a person from that period and
• 1:04:30
  place shouldn't really have knowledge of it? I don't know, does the Bible mention South
• 1:04:36
  America or the dinosaurs, for example?
• 1:04:40
  Yeah. No, there's nothing supernatural. There's nothing where we are like, how can they know
• 1:04:49
  about that? They shouldn't know about that. However, one interesting thing is you see
• 1:04:55
  a lot about people arguing that in Ezekiel and Revelation and everything that we have
• 1:05:00
  these end times prophecies about China and Iran and Russia. And all that is just pure
• 1:05:06
  nonsense.
• 1:05:07
  In the Bible?
• 1:05:08
  Yeah.
• 1:05:09
  Okay.
• 1:05:10
  But there is a paper that was just published in a very well-respected academic journal
• 1:05:18
  arguing that China is in the Bible. And it makes an interesting argument. Now, it's not
• 1:05:22
  saying that people's republic of China. It's not saying the current government. But there
• 1:05:26
  is a reference in Isaiah 49-12 to the land of Sinim. And the context indicates that this
• 1:05:33
  is a land that's far off to the east. And a lot of scholars have said, oh, this is actually
• 1:05:40
  supposed to be Aswan, which is a region in southern Egypt on the Nile. And this article
• 1:05:48
  that just came out this month in this journal is arguing, no, this is a reference to China.
• 1:05:54
  The earliest etymologically related word is the Greek word sine, which is like Sinim,
• 1:06:02
  a masculine plural Gentilic, a reference to a people. And this is referenced over a dozen
• 1:06:08
  times by Ptolemy in the second century CE book called Geography, which seems to place
• 1:06:13
  it far off into the east as well. And so there is an argument that is now being made that
• 1:06:20
  the region of China, as it was known anciently, is referenced in the Bible, which is one that
• 1:06:28
  kind of threw me for a loop for a little bit. But in terms of things, they would have had
• 1:06:32
  no way of knowing. No, there's nothing like that in the Bible.
• 1:06:34
  Yeah. But it's not, like you said, the current country of China. That would have been something
• 1:06:40
  if Xi Jinping pops up in the Bible.
• 1:06:44
  Yeah, no names of dynasties, just this generic reference to a people group that probably
• 1:06:51
  aligns with the designations for China that were used anciently for that region of the
• 1:06:58
  world.
• 1:07:00
  Before the interview, I did a little Google search, couldn't help myself. And there was
• 1:07:04
  a lot of claims of scientific knowledge in the Bible from certain believers in certain
• 1:07:13
  Christian sites. I recently read, yeah, there was an article on the Christian side that
• 1:07:19
  said that Genesis explicitly mentions the first law of thermodynamics. So does the Bible
• 1:07:27
  contain a secret trove of scientific knowledge?
• 1:07:30
  No, not even remotely. This is people trying to read in current scientific thinking into
• 1:07:40
  poetic turns of phrase and things like that, that are just vague enough that we can kind
• 1:07:47
  of import our ideas into them. Because you do have a concept of God trying to impose
• 1:07:54
  order upon chaos. The idea, and this is something common to the creation myths of the ancient
• 1:08:01
  world, is that initially everything was just kind of chaotic, indeterminate water.
• 1:08:08
  Some sort of sludge.
• 1:08:11
  Yeah, the process of creation was a process of giving order to that chaos. And so that
• 1:08:22
  is found in Mesopotamia, it's found in Anatolia, it's found in Egypt, it's found all over long
• 1:08:27
  before the Bible. But some people look at that and think, ah, this is the idea of thermodynamics.
• 1:08:35
  And so God is necessary to overcome entropy. And that is why we have order, because God
• 1:08:43
  put it there. And that's just reading contemporary thinking back into a text that did not have
• 1:08:50
  any such understanding whatsoever.
• 1:08:52
  Okay, we have to draw to a close. Such an interesting conversation. But I wanted to
• 1:08:57
  save the sassiest bit for the end. What's the deal with Satan? Like when I was growing
• 1:09:03
  up, when I was going to Catholic school, sometimes he was a scary dude. Sometimes it was like
• 1:09:10
  actually what people did. Sometimes it was referenced like some sort of evil energy,
• 1:09:16
  or some sort of a worldview. How does the Satan or Lucifer or whatever feature in the
• 1:09:23
  Bible?
• 1:09:25
  So in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is a title. It means adversary or something like that.
• 1:09:32
  And it is used to refer to anyone who takes an adversarial position against anyone else.
• 1:09:37
  So humans are described in the Bible as a Satan. Even the angel of the Lord, Satan is
• 1:09:44
  the Hebrew word, yeah. Even the angel of the Lord, when they confront Balaam in Numbers
• 1:09:49
  22, it says the angel of the Lord stood as a Satan against Balaam.
• 1:09:55
  Sorry, who's Balaam?
• 1:09:57
  Balaam is the prophet that the king of, I think, is it Barak? There's a foreign king
• 1:10:07
  who hires Balaam to curse Israel in the book of Numbers.
• 1:10:12
  And Balaam is like, I'm going to do whatever God tells me to do. And there's a part where
• 1:10:16
  Balaam is riding a donkey and the angel of the Lord with a drawn sword confronts him.
• 1:10:21
  And the donkey ends up talking because the donkey can see the angel and Balaam can't.
• 1:10:25
  But the angel of the Lord is a Satan.
• 1:10:28
  And then in places like Zechariah and the book of Job, the title has a definite article
• 1:10:35
  on it, the Satan. And here it seems to be understanding the Satan not as an identity,
• 1:10:43
  but as a role that a specific divine being has within the divine pantheon, the divine
• 1:10:49
  council, kind of like a prosecuting attorney. So their responsibility is to kind of bring
• 1:10:55
  charges against humans and things like that.
• 1:10:57
  So in Job, you have the Satan coming before God's throne with all of the children of God.
• 1:11:05
  And God's saying, hey, have you checked out Job? He's a real one. And the Satan, the prosecuting
• 1:11:11
  attorney saying, I bet I can trip him up.
• 1:11:14
  So in the Hebrew Bible, it's not the name of a specific individual. It's just a role
• 1:11:20
  or a title. In the Enochic literature, when you have this story of a lead malevolent angel
• 1:11:28
  convincing all these other malevolent angels to come down to earth and to have intercourse
• 1:11:34
  with human women and to introduce all of evil to humanity, so it's accounting for the problem
• 1:11:41
  of evil, then you get this idea of a head malevolent angel. And their names, they have
• 1:11:46
  a bunch of different names. Sometimes it's Shamihaza, sometimes it's Azael, sometimes
• 1:11:50
  it's Azazel, sometimes it's Melchirashah, sometimes it's Mastema. It's a bunch of different
• 1:11:57
  names.
• 1:11:58
  And this becomes kind of the template for what we see in the New Testament, where this
• 1:12:06
  individual now has the name Satan. And the New Testament is kind of consolidating all
• 1:12:14
  of the bad characters from the Hebrew Bible in this divine profile. So Lucifer is not
• 1:12:20
  identified as Satan or as an evil divine figure anywhere in the Hebrew Bible or in the New
• 1:12:26
  Testament. Lucifer is just a sarcastic demeaning of a Babylonian king. The serpent from the
• 1:12:34
  Garden of Eden is not identified as Satan anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, anywhere in
• 1:12:38
  the New Testament. That's another post biblical identification. The New Testament identifies
• 1:12:43
  Leviathan as Satan in the Book of Revelation, where it's this great seven-headed red dragon
• 1:12:50
  who falls from the skies and sweeps down a third of the stars of heaven with their tail.
• 1:12:56
  So you're taking a bunch of different figures and you're mushing them together in kind of
• 1:13:00
  this grab bag of evil that we're now going to name Satan. And that's kind of how that
• 1:13:06
  concept has functioned ever since then. If something is bad, oh, it's satanic. We have
• 1:13:12
  the Saturday Night Live church lady. Could it be Satan? And today I get a lot of people
• 1:13:19
  on Twitter who accuse me of being satanic. And the same thing on TikTok. I am satanic.
• 1:13:26
  And it's because Satan is just the kind of mental exemplar representation of everything
• 1:13:33
  that is evil. And you see that already in the New Testament with kind of drawing in
• 1:13:38
  all these different figures and they're all squished together and they're Satan. And so
• 1:13:43
  it's a malleable concept that we can just add all this stuff to and it becomes kind
• 1:13:50
  of a very useful little tool to try to draw lines between good and evil in whatever way
• 1:13:58
  serves our interests.
• 1:14:00
  Is it similar with demons? Or is that a whole other thing? Because half of scary movies
• 1:14:07
  are about exorcisms, which is a rich tradition in Catholicism, I suppose.
• 1:14:13
  You don't really have demons in the Hebrew Bible, but there are concepts of spirits that
• 1:14:22
  can penetrate your body and cause you illness and take over your executive functions. They
• 1:14:29
  can enter in the ears and women during menstruation are particularly susceptible to them getting
• 1:14:34
  through the integrity of their body. And so you see that in Mesopotamia and Egypt and
• 1:14:43
  elsewhere. You don't really see it in the Hebrew Bible, but once you get to the Greco-Roman
• 1:14:46
  period where they've got a lot of concepts of daimonis, Christianity kind of adopts the
• 1:14:53
  Greco-Roman perspective. And so you get demonic possession within Christianity. So it's a
• 1:15:01
  bit of a different story, but it kind of dovetails nicely with an idea that you see in the Book
• 1:15:07
  of Enoch where these malevolent angels came down and they had children with human women
• 1:15:12
  and those children were giants. And the giants had children and the children were Nephilim.
• 1:15:20
  The giants died and when they died, their spirits became the evil spirits that are demons
• 1:15:27
  that possess people and all that kind of stuff. So you do have a narrative way to account
• 1:15:32
  for it in Greco-Roman period Jewish literature.
• 1:15:35
  Well, that's crazy. I've never heard about that before, especially not in Catholic school,
• 1:15:41
  that there were giants and demons having sex with women and the children were giants and
• 1:15:47
  all that stuff. I mean, wow.
• 1:15:49
  The Book of Enoch was very influential within early Judaism and even within early Christianity.
• 1:15:54
  And it's even quoted in the Epistle of Jude. They quote directly from the Book of Enoch.
• 1:15:59
  However, by this third, fourth century CE, most of the intellectual Christians were kind
• 1:16:06
  of like, we're kind of sick of the Book of Enoch. And so it gets dumped and so it does
• 1:16:12
  not form part of the canon. However, the reason we know as much as we do about the Book of
• 1:16:17
  Enoch is because there were some missionaries who took the Septuagint, the Greek translation
• 1:16:23
  of the Jewish scriptures, including First Enoch, down to what was then known as the
• 1:16:28
  Kingdom of Aksum and introduced Christianity to the royal household there. And that is
• 1:16:35
  what we now know of as Ethiopia. So the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church still has the Book
• 1:16:40
  of Enoch as part of their canon. And our earliest manuscripts of the full Book of Enoch are
• 1:16:47
  all Ethiopic manuscripts. So it was preserved within one church's canon.
• 1:16:53
  Okay, I don't want to drag you into politics, but over there in the States, you've got presidential
• 1:16:58
  elections coming up again, and that provides a lot of, let's say, memorable content for
• 1:17:03
  the entire planet. One of the funniest moments I thought, at least during the previous election
• 1:17:09
  cycle was when a journalist asked Donald Trump what his favorite Bible verse was, and Trump
• 1:17:16
  replied, I don't want to talk about that because that's really personal, so I don't want to
• 1:17:20
  get into verses, but the Bible means a lot to me. And then the journalist asked, are
• 1:17:25
  you a New Testament guy or an Old Testament guy? And Trump said, probably equal. So, I
• 1:17:32
  mean, that's really amusing, the sort of the cat ate my homework type of moment.
• 1:17:38
  Do you think that Donald Trump, unlike me, actually read the Bible?
• 1:17:43
  Oh, I'm sure at some point or another he's cracked a biblical spine, but I wanted that
• 1:17:52
  reporter to say, name a verse, just quote a verse, because he so clearly would not have
• 1:17:59
  been able to, because he clearly doesn't have any clue what he's talking about, and is just
• 1:18:04
  trying to be as generic as possible, and just trying to seem as if he's right in the middle,
• 1:18:12
  he agrees with everybody, but he clearly has no idea what he's talking about, because he
• 1:18:17
  is a laughably stupid adult.
• 1:18:20
  Dr. McClellan, are you a New Testament or an Old Testament guy?
• 1:18:25
  I'm a Hebrew Bible guy, primarily. That is the text that most of my research has focused
• 1:18:33
  on. That's where I did most of my, most of my degrees focused on Hebrew Bible. And I'm
• 1:18:38
  mostly interested in the New Testament to the degree that it shows the developments
• 1:18:44
  from the Hebrew Bible. So yeah, I'm a Hebrew Bible guy myself.
• 1:18:49
  What's your favorite passage in the Bible, and why?
• 1:18:53
  I think I really enjoy Deuteronomy 32-8, just because there's so much in there. The possibility
• 1:19:01
  that this preserves an early distinction between Elion and Adonai is fascinating. I think that's
• 1:19:08
  a wonderful passage. There are a handful of others that I think from a moral, inspirational
• 1:19:16
  point of view are cool. But in terms of the one that I... Whenever I pick up a new translation
• 1:19:22
  of the Bible, the first verse I turn to is always Deuteronomy 32-8 and 9, because I want
• 1:19:27
  to see how they handled that verse.
• 1:19:30
  Thank you so much for this conversation. What a delight. Where can people follow your work?
• 1:19:35
  You do have social media, I know.
• 1:19:37
  I do. I go by at McClellan, and that's my last name spelled phonetically, M-A-K-L-E-L-A-N,
• 1:19:44
  on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Twitter, also on Blue Sky, and on threads. I host,
• 1:19:52
  I co-host with my friend Dan Beecher, the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we do the same
• 1:19:57
  thing I try to do on social media, increase public access to the academic study of the
• 1:20:01
  Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. We have episodes
• 1:20:06
  that come out every Monday. We're on YouTube, as well as on all of the podcast aggregate
• 1:20:13
  sites. And then I also have a website, mclellan.org, spelled like my username, where I occasionally
• 1:20:19
  teach online classes and have online classes that I've taught in the past for sale there
• 1:20:25
  as well. And then I will have a trade book coming out soon called The Bible Says So,
• 1:20:33
  where I address whether or not the Bible does say all the things people claim it says. Hopefully,
• 1:20:40
  we'll have pre-orders and a cover and everything out within the next couple of months. So I'm
• 1:20:45
  very much looking forward to getting that out in the public.
• 1:20:47
  Awesome. Again, thank you so much. This was amazing.
• 1:20:50
  Well, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Wonderful questions.
• 1:20:53
  Thank you so much for listening. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing
• 1:20:56
  to Smart Cookies on YouTube. What else is there? Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And if
• 1:21:04
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• 1:21:09
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• 1:21:15
  Podcast in there. You should be able to find me. Last but not least, I have to thank the
• 1:21:20
  absolute legends that are my producers on this show, my existing patrons on Patreon,
• 1:21:27
  Aida, Mancian, Micheal Medved, Medinio, Gordon, Yurechuk, Lorenzo, Mila, Carmen, Tai Chi,
• 1:21:35
  Gordon and Veronica. Without you guys, this show wouldn't exist. So massive thanks. And
• 1:21:43
  yeah, see you in the next episode. Bye.