Ep 29: God's Big Fish Story

00:00- I had to read this like six or seven times,

00:04and I still don't have a handle

00:05on what the Lord is trying to say here.

00:07- The idea is that Jonah is so upset

00:10about the destruction of such a small thing,

00:13but is looking forward to the destruction

00:15of such a big thing, and God's like,

00:18you really want all these people to die?

00:21And also this cattle?

00:23- And the cows, what about the cows?

00:26- Yeah, what about the cattle, Jonah?

00:28- You never think of the cattle.

00:30(laughing)

00:31(upbeat music)

00:34- Hey everybody, I am Dan McClellan.

00:38- And I'm Dan Beecher.

00:39- And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast

00:42where we seek to increase the public's access

00:44to the academic study of the Bible and religion

00:47and combat the spread of misinformation about the same.

00:51How are you doing today, Dan?

00:53- You know, it's a giant fish day.

00:57Here on Data Over Dogma, so I'm happy about it.

01:01- The deadliest of catches.

01:03- I once caught a fish this big.

01:07- Or should I say, it once caught me.

01:09- Or should I say, it once caught me.

01:13Yeah, we're gonna be talking some Jonah stuff,

01:16and look, here's what today's episode is about.

01:19You and I, you just said it off the air.

01:23It's about ways that God is characterized in the Bible

01:28that might surprise you.

01:30- So stay tuned because we're getting into,

01:30- Yeah.

01:34this guy, this character of God is not one character.

01:38- Yeah.

01:39- There's, you know, you'd like to talk to Dan

01:43about the non-univocality of this book.

01:46- Right.

01:47- It becomes clear, the more you read it,

01:50these different authors have a different view

01:53of who and what God is,

01:57and we're gonna be delving into it.

01:59- Yeah, this is something that I've said a handful of times.

02:02There is no God of the Bible in the sense

02:05that there are numerous different gods of the Bible,

02:09and we're gonna talk about two very different representations

02:12in the book of Jonah and also in the book of Genesis.

02:14- All right, well, let's dive into that with chapter and verse.

02:19(upbeat music)

02:22- So I think we should start,

02:25the book of Jonah is short, it is mercifully short,

02:30it is four chapters, very readable,

02:33and I gotta say, I read it multiple times

02:38sort of in prep for the show, and you know,

02:43the thing that we all remember and the thing that, you know,

02:47the reason that we all know this story

02:49is because you tell it to kids

02:50'cause it's got this fish thing in the middle,

02:52it's got this thing where it gets gulped up by a fish,

02:57but that's like not the interesting part of this story for me.

03:01- No.

03:02- I mean, it's fascinating, it's, yeah, okay,

03:04it lives for three days inside of a fish, that's crazy.

03:09But like the relationship between Jonah and God

03:14and how they both act in this thing,

03:18it's got me baffled, man, it's got me baffled.

03:21So let's go through it, I'm gonna launch this in,

03:25we start basically, there's no act one to this story.

03:29We are diving into the middle of the story

03:32because suddenly, and I literally went to the book

03:37beforehand just to see, is there any setup to this at all,

03:39new?

03:40(laughing)

03:42So verse one says, "Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah,

03:46son of Amitai, saying, go at once to Nineveh,

03:51that great city, and cry out against it,

03:54for their wickedness has come up before me."

03:57Now, I need to know, do we have any previous references

04:02to wickedness of Nineveh, where is Nineveh,

04:05where is Jonah, who's what?

04:07It literally starts very much in Madea Rez,

04:10I don't know what's going on.

04:12- Yeah, and there's a reason for that.

04:15But, so Jonah the son of Amitai is mentioned

04:18in Second Kings 1425, which would purport

04:22to set this story pretty early in the first millennium BCE.

04:27Now, the problem with that is that it mentions Nineveh,

04:33the great city, which was made the capital of Assyria

04:37long after the book of Second Kings places

04:45Jonah the son of Amitai.

04:48So, we have an Assyrian king, believe it was Sinakarib,

04:53who moves the capital of Assyria to Nineveh.

04:57And so, the story seems to be written

05:01from a much later perspective,

05:03looking back at claiming to be from a much earlier time.

05:08Now, the Assyrians were just the ultimate villains.

05:14In the time period in which this story was probably written,

05:17which is probably going to be seventh century

05:22at the very earliest, but probably a little later than that.

05:26One of the things that Sinakarib did was invade

05:30the northern kingdom of Israel and come down into Judah

05:34during the reign of Hezekiah.

05:36And this just totally decimated the land.

05:41And Sinakarib was ultimately unsuccessful in taking

05:46the capital city of Jerusalem.

05:48The king Hezekiah had thrown off a vassalage

05:50up to that point.

05:51They had been paying a tribute to Assyria,

05:54and then Hezekiah said,

05:55"Not gonna do it, wouldn't be prudent."

05:57And so, Sinakarib came through,

05:59and the idea is just devastate the whole land

06:01and then say, "Pay me my money."

06:04And one of the, there's a story that is memorialized

06:10and some wall reliefs.

06:12So imagery carved into a wall in a palace in Nineveh

06:17that commemorates the taking of a city called Lakeish,

06:21which was the second most populous, most important city

06:25in Judah in that time period, second only to Jerusalem.

06:30And that was Sinakarib's base of operations.

06:34But in this wall relief, we can see representation

06:38of the Assyrian army laying siege to the city of Lakeish,

06:43and they have siege engines, they have archers,

06:48they have people slinging rocks,

06:51and then the people of Lakeish are throwing down torches,

06:54they're throwing down rocks,

06:56they're trying to fend them off,

06:57and the Assyrians are decapitating people,

07:00the Assyrians are skinning people,

07:02the Assyrians are impaling people on pikes,

07:06the Assyrians are taking the survivors

07:07and marching them back to Assyria

07:09to be scattered around the Assyrian empire,

07:13so that basically their ethnic identity is destroyed.

07:18- This all sounds very unpleasant, I'm just gonna say it.

07:21- Yeah, and you can see these wall reliefs

07:26have been, for lack of better words, stolen,

07:30and now appear in the British Museum,

07:32but you can go walk through,

07:34and you can see Sinakarib's representation

07:37of basically brutalizing this city and these people.

07:42- Oh, I think I have seen that.

07:43- Have you?

07:44- Now that I think about it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

07:46- You're kinda like walking around,

07:47there's some corners and a lot of flat,

07:49and a lot of it's kind of fragmentary,

07:52and so this representation of Sinakarib

07:56is this brutal dictator who comes through

07:58and just murders indiscriminately and mercilessly,

08:02this is how the Assyrians were thought of in this time period.

08:06So the idea that God would come to a prophet

08:08and say, hey, guess what?

08:10Destruction to Nineveh would be an exciting time.

08:15- Okay, but that's not what happens.

08:18- That's not what happens.

08:19- Because Jonah is told to go to, first of all,

08:23this is the worst job you can be given by God.

08:25I understand, God says go to the place

08:28that you hate the most and tell everybody there

08:33that they are wicked, which in general,

08:36people don't respond well to.

08:38I'm just gonna say, I wouldn't wanna have to go do that.

08:42- Yeah.

08:42- And Jonah doesn't wanna do it either,

08:44and literally runs away from God.

08:48- Yes.

08:49- He flees to Tarshish, which when I looked it up,

08:54a lot of maps had Tarshish located in Spain.

08:59- Yeah, so Tarshish is not, it's a word that means C.

09:04- Okay.

09:06- And so there are some people who try to identify it

09:09with specific locations, but I think it's probably kind of

09:12a Timbuktu kind of--

09:15- Okay, just a--

09:16- This place far away.

09:18- A stand in for not here.

09:20- Yeah, yeah.

09:21- But he's trying to get out from underneath,

09:24from out from the presence of the Lord.

09:28- Yes, and that's a good way to put it,

09:31because this is a specific literary genre

09:34that we're talking about.

09:35We're talking about a prophetic text.

09:37And in prophetic text, the first thing you do

09:41is situate the prophet in a specific time period.

09:44And then you have the call, the prophet's call.

09:47And usually that is either taking place in the temple

09:50or results in the prophet going up to the temple.

09:53You always went up to the temple,

09:55even if it was downhill, because it was spiritually higher.

10:00And so if you're in Israel, you go up to Jerusalem.

10:03If you're in Jerusalem, you go up to the temple.

10:06But what does Jonah do?

10:07Jonah goes down.

10:09- He went down to Japa.

10:12- He went down into the ship.

10:14And then when he's in the ship,

10:16he goes down into the bottom of the ship.

10:20So Jonah is the anti-profit.

10:23Jonah is doing the opposite of what this genre

10:26typically represents the prophet doing.

10:28Instead of going up to the presence of God,

10:30Jonah is going down to escape the presence of God.

10:34- So what, all that going down,

10:36that is a good way to get yourself caught in a fish.

10:38- Yeah, that's as the great poet once said.

10:44And so he's doing everything exactly opposite

10:48of what is expected.

10:49So this generates some narrative tension

10:52for folks who are familiar with the prophetic genre,

10:54but are hearing the story for the first time.

10:56This is a bit of a head scratcher.

10:58What's going on?

10:59This would be, this is the big leagues.

11:03This is the dream assignment to go tell the Assyrians

11:07that God is coming for him.

11:09And so we've got some narrative tension

11:12that is not gonna get resolved until the very end.

11:15- Now I'm gonna jump in here and ask one thing.

11:18We have talked about how each region, each people

11:22have their own deity in this time and place.

11:27So presumably the Assyrians have their own God.

11:32- Yes.

11:33- The Ninevehians, Ninevites have their own God.

11:38So when Jonah is meant to go there

11:44and call them to account,

11:48he's going on behalf of a God that isn't their God.

11:51That's a, is there a tension there?

11:55- Well, for the audience there would not have been

11:57because this is probably coming from a time period

11:59when they accept Adonai as the God of the whole earth.

12:03- Okay.

12:04- So we've gotten that far.

12:06- I think that's probably likely.

12:08And if that's the case, then it's later

12:10than the seventh century.

12:11It's more like late sixth century, maybe fifth century.

12:15It's that I think that makes the most sense of that notion,

12:19but at the same time you do have some notion

12:24of God's kind of beating up on other nations.

12:27However, they could not have gotten away

12:30with saying our God beats up on Assyria

12:33when Assyria was actually powerful

12:36'cause that would be absolutely laughable

12:39'cause Assyria owned these folks.

12:42So either this was something intended to be kind of

12:46thumbing the nose at Assyria,

12:48kind of internally just making fun of them

12:51or it was written after Assyria was gone,

12:53had been defeated by the Babylonians.

12:55But normally, yeah, that would be the situation.

12:57That's Asher's territory, that's Asher's purview.

13:01- Well, we don't want to step on Asher's toes.

13:04- No, absolutely not.

13:05- So anyway, we're on a boat now.

13:09We're running away from our God, we being,

13:14I guess we are now all Jonah.

13:16And there's a big tempest, all the sailors are freaking out.

13:21Meanwhile, somehow Jonah is a very heavy sleeper

13:27and is sleeping through everything.

13:28They will have to wake him up, whose fault is this?

13:32They actually draw lots to see whose fault it is.

13:36Apparently that's a good way to determine

13:38who the problematic one is on the boat.

13:41And it turns out to be Jonah,

13:44who eventually admits that, yes, I'm running away from God.

13:49And they're like, well, what do we do?

13:52And he doesn't, he has an interesting solution

13:55to the whole thing.

13:56It's not what would have jumped immediately to my mind.

13:59But in what becomes a theme for Jonah,

14:03he says, kill me now, in a sense.

14:08He says, throw me into the sea

14:10and it will quiet down for you.

14:13- Which is an interesting thing to do.

14:13- Yeah.

14:16It scares the crap out of the sailors

14:19because the sailors, then they have to,

14:22and they've all prayed to their own gods to no avail.

14:26Now, I guess they pray to Jonah's God,

14:29who has caused all of this, to say,

14:32hey, don't get mad at, he's telling us to throw him off.

14:36Don't get mad at us, we shouldn't get into trouble

14:40just 'cause we threw the guy off when he told us to, okay?

14:44That's how I interpret, is that about right?

14:47- Yeah.

14:48- Yeah, well, please, oh Lord, they say in verse 14,

14:51please, oh Lord, we pray, do not let us perish

14:55on account of this man's life.

14:57Do not make us guilty of innocent blood.

14:59For you, oh Lord, have done as it pleased you,

15:03presumably meaning you're the one

15:05that caused this storm.

15:07We're just trying to appease you.

15:09- Yeah, well, it sounds like that's the last option.

15:13He's like, throw me overboard,

15:14and they're like, let's try to make it to land.

15:16And then they're like, look God, whatever you're doing,

15:20we're not a part of this.

15:21And now, please don't get upset at us for doing this.

15:26- Yeah, it also seems like throw yourself overboard, man.

15:30Don't put this on us, but they do it.

15:32- He's just sitting there like, okay,

15:34I'll just stand over here.

15:35- Yeah, exactly, but yes, they throw him overboard,

15:39and then the seas are calm, and that's fine.

15:41And then the fish thing happens, Jonah is swallowed up

15:46by a presumably giant fish.

15:50- The Hebrew is daggadole, which just means great fish.

15:53- Okay.

15:54- So some kind of big fish.

15:55- That's a, you know, I've seen the Mediterranean.

15:59It doesn't generally support very large fish, but okay,

16:03we have a very large fish that eats Jonah,

16:06and he's in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

16:10That's a long time to be in a fish.

16:14- Long time to be going without oxygen.

16:17- Yeah, yeah, and swimming around in digestive fluids

16:20and whatever, but he seems to be okay.

16:23It gives you time to come up with a very long,

16:27weird poetic prayer, which he delivers.

16:33I don't, I didn't, as I read through it,

16:35I didn't see anything that was like too interesting,

16:39although now that you've talked about like going up

16:42to the temple, part of the prayer is,

16:46shall I look again upon your holy temple?

16:49Like, so now we've got him sort of yearning once more

16:52to be at the temple, which is interesting.

16:57And then eventually, you know, the prayer is good enough

17:02and the Lord speaks to the fish

17:05and it lurks him out onto the dry land.

17:09- Yeah, and he says, I will sacrifice to you.

17:13I will do what I have vowed, basically.

17:18I'll do what you told me to do since I'm a prophet.

17:22That's why I get the big bucks.

17:24So I'm gonna do what you say and Adonai speaks to the fish

17:29and says, hey, induce yourself to vomit, Jonah up,

17:34and he vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

17:37And one interesting thing about this story

17:39is that the fish actually changes sex.

17:42It's originally referred to as a dog,

17:44which is just the masculine form of the noun fish,

17:48but at the end of Jonah 2, verse two,

17:51it refers to the belly of Hadagah,

17:55which would be the feminine form of that noun.

17:59And so, yeah, and then at the end of the story,

18:02the fish is masculine again.

18:04So that's something that has caused some commentators

18:07a little bit of acid reflux over the centuries.

18:11What's going on?

18:12- For anyone who wants to deny trans identities,

18:15we refer you to Jonah's fish.

18:17- Yeah, Jonah's fish, there you go.

18:19So anyway, Jonah's back on land.

18:21He has promised to do good.

18:23I think that's a good moment for us to take a brief break.

18:26We'll be back in just a moment.

18:28- All right.

18:29- So when we last left our hero,

18:31he was vomit, and he was on dry land again,

18:37and headed back to Nineveh,

18:40or headed to Nineveh,

18:43to which presumably he had never been before.

18:45- Most likely he had never been there.

18:48And I'm looking for the message

18:52that God says to declare to Nineveh.

18:56So this is Jonah three, verse four.

18:58At the end of 40 days, Nineveh will be overthrown.

19:01- Okay.

19:03- So this is not a conditional prophecy.

19:07This is not repent, lest ye be overthrown.

19:10This is 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown.

19:14So we've got a very definitive black and white prophecy here.

19:19- Yep, and so Jonah three, verse two,

19:24just right before that says,

19:27is the Lord saying, get up, go to Nineveh,

19:30and tell it the message that I tell you.

19:33So we can assume that that message,

19:35that 40 days thing, that Jonah is now walking

19:38through the streets of Nineveh shouting to people,

19:42is actually the Lord's message.

19:44That 40 days is coming, you better repent.

19:49- Yeah, and that raises an interesting point.

19:53We are likely to assume that that was precisely

19:57the message, but as we're gonna see,

19:59maybe this is Jonah's editorializing.

20:01- Yeah, it comes.

20:03Yeah, there is some question there.

20:05- Yeah.

20:06- I just wanna point out, the next thing that happens

20:10in this story is maybe the most remarkable thing

20:13I've ever read in the Bible,

20:15because you read in the Bible a lot

20:17about people being called to repentance,

20:20and almost every time you hear the people are like,

20:23nah, no thanks.

20:25- Yeah, this guy again.

20:27- We're doing good, we're fine.

20:28And it doesn't end well, the whole world gets flooded,

20:32or all of the first born of your people are killed,

20:37or whatever, but apparently Nineveh was in a contrite,

20:43moment, because everybody,

20:46and I do mean everybody in Nineveh,

20:50suddenly goes, oh, God's mad at us?

20:53Well, darn, let's just completely repent.

20:58- Yeah.

20:59- And they all do.

21:00- They declare a fast, they put on sackcloth

21:04from the greatest to the least of them.

21:06The king hears about it, gets up from his throne,

21:10took off his robe, put on sackcloth, sat in ashes.

21:13This is prototypical Israelite morning convention.

21:18- Yeah.

21:20- And so everybody hears Jonah's message

21:23and takes it to heart.

21:25- Yeah, apparently none of them knew.

21:27Wait, we were being wicked, us?

21:31Are you sure?

21:31Oh my gosh.

21:32- Yeah, and then we have this decree issued by the king.

21:37No human or animal, cattle or sheep is to taste anything.

21:41They must not eat, and they must not drink water.

21:43Every person and animal must put on sackcloth

21:47and cry earnestly to God.

21:50And cry earnestly to God,

21:52and everyone must turn from their evil way of living

21:54and from the violence that they do.

21:56And then here's the interesting part.

22:00Who knows?

22:01Maybe God will relent and change his mind.

22:06- He may turn from his fierce anger

22:06- Right.

22:09so that we do not perish.

22:11- First of all, I want everybody to imagine

22:13all of those cows and everything in sackcloth.

22:16- Yeah, and crying out to God.

22:17They're their owners going, cry out to God.

22:20- Move to God.

22:21- But yeah, the whole, okay.

22:27If there's one thing we can say about omnipotence

22:30and omniscience, it's kind of that you don't really

22:34have to change your mind ever.

22:36'Cause you already know what's,

22:37you know everything that's gonna happen.

22:39- Yeah, and we actually have in the book of Numbers

22:43in chapter 22 or 23, I forget exactly where the verse is.

22:48But in response to Baloch pleading with Balaam

22:52to change his prophecy and his curse,

22:55Balaam says, God is not a man that he should lie

22:59or a human that he should change his mind.

23:02He cannot go back on what he decrees.

23:05And so the Ninevites here are like eh,

23:09maybe God will change their mind.

23:11And then Jonah chapter three verse 10,

23:15when God saw what they did,

23:17how they turned away from their evil ways.

23:19And I assume this means they successfully got their cattle

23:23to dress in sackcloth and cry out to God.

23:25- I don't see how you can interpret it any other way.

23:27- Yeah, I mean that's, goes without saying.

23:30God changed his mind about the evil,

23:34the calamity that he said he would bring upon them

23:37and he did not do it. And that word for change his mind

23:40is the word that is nacham is the verbal root

23:44and it is translated to repent frequently.

23:47- Oh, that's right, God repents.

23:49- Yeah, repents or changes their mind.

23:52And so this explicitly has God going, good point.

23:57Okay, I am changing my mind.

24:00- My bad, you guys, I was just mad.

24:03I was just a little bit upset.

24:06But this brings us to the money shot.

24:09This is where we get the big reveal.

24:13We get into Jonah chapter four,

24:15but this was very displeasing to Jonah and he became angry.

24:20And then he prays to God.

24:23Oh, Adonai, is this not what I said

24:26while I was still in my own country?

24:28That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning for,

24:31I knew that you are a gracious God

24:34and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love

24:37and ready to relent from punishing.

24:39So what Jonah is saying is you want to know

24:42why I ran the opposite direction?

24:45You want to know why I did not take the dream assignments

24:49to go preach destruction to Nineveh?

24:51It's because I knew you would forgive them

24:56and I would rather die than watch the Assyrians be forgiven.

25:01It's so crazy to me, like I, when I first read this,

25:05I read it so, I had to like Google why is Jonah angry

25:10because it didn't make any sense to me.

25:12Yeah.

25:13That like, he succeeded, he went,

25:16he called them to repentance.

25:19Somehow he was so effective that they all believed him

25:22and did it, they actually did it, which is shocking.

25:26And then you gotta imagine it was pretty half-hearted

25:29on his part too, he was probably like.

25:31I don't know, he's a repent or something.

25:34Plus he smells like fish.

25:35It's like, it was a bad time, but like, he's so effective.

25:39He actually achieves the goal that he has set out before him

25:42and he is furious about it.

25:46Yeah.

25:47I want to die, just kill me now.

25:50If you're going to forgive them and be nice to them,

25:54just kill me because I don't want any part of it.

25:56And I think it's an interesting story about,

25:59'cause we're doing a couple things here,

26:01we're taking the prophetic genre

26:02and we're turning it on its head.

26:04And we're doing everything the opposite of what's expected.

26:07It's like starting out a story with Once Upon a Time,

26:11but then it's like Romeo and Juliet with Leo DiCaprio

26:15where it's like, this is not Once Upon a Time, this is 1996.

26:19And it's flipping all the expectations on its head,

26:24but then we're taking this,

26:26we're also including a bit of satire,

26:29'cause we've got, you know, Jonah's like,

26:32tell your cattle to pray, whatever, to God.

26:35So we're also engaged in a little comedy,

26:39but then it's kind of a lecture

26:41on the merciful versus the vindictive God.

26:46God starts off all vindictive

26:49and you don't know why Jonah's upset about this,

26:52but then you get the reveal at the end,

26:54Jonah knows that God ultimately is merciful

26:57and knows that if I go do this,

26:59God is going to forgive them

27:01and I'm gonna have to sit there and watch these people

27:04who are responsible for so much wickedness in our world,

27:08watch them be forgiven.

27:10And he would rather die than watch that happen.

27:13- And speaking of watching,

27:15we got to a booth.

27:19He goes to the, you know, one side of the town

27:24and makes himself a booth.

27:25I don't know what that means.

27:26I don't know what booth means in this context.

27:30- Well, the Hebrew word is Sukkah

27:32and it's where we get the Sukkot,

27:35the festival of booths.

27:37So yeah, it's basically just using branches

27:41and stuff like that to create a little shelter.

27:44- Well, but it's not good shelter

27:47because the sun is beating down on him

27:49and the Lord decides to help out.

27:53- He kinda teases him a little bit.

27:55- Yeah, yeah, exactly.

27:56I gotta say, this is one where I greatly prefer

28:00the King James version to any other version

28:04because the KJV says that it's a gourd.

28:09The Lord makes a gourd grow up over his head,

28:16which I think is delightful.

28:19I don't know why there's a gourd.

28:21How big is this gourd that the Lord has prepared?

28:26- Well, and it's got, let's see,

28:28the Hebrew word there is Kikayon

28:31and the own ending there can be a diminutive.

28:35So it could be like a little gourdette.

28:38- A little gourd?

28:39- It's like, yeah, it's like adding Ito

28:41to the end of a Spanish word, so.

28:44- Oh my gosh.

28:45- Well, the NRSV has a bush.

28:48It says that God makes a bush grow

28:51to shade him and save him from his discomfort.

28:56I just like the idea that it's a gourd.

28:58I'm just, I'm sticking with the KJV on this.

29:00- Yeah.

29:02- So anyway, so God makes a gourd grow

29:04and then Jonah is nice.

29:08It is pleased by the gourd

29:09'cause it's a nice shade structure for him.

29:13And then that night, God ruins the gourd

29:18or the bush with a worm.

29:19Just makes a worm go in and I guess eat the gourd?

29:25- Yeah.

29:26- Somehow it ruins that, so the next morning

29:29there is no more shade.

29:31And again, the sun rises and Jonah, it's so hot,

29:36he passes out, and then he gets mad again

29:39and says, you know what, kill me again.

29:42- Yeah, this is maybe the most suicidal guy

29:46in all of the Bible, I'm not sure.

29:47- Well, I think this part is kind of poking him

29:51a little bit, being like, look at this whiny little brat.

29:53He's like, oh, it's sunny, kill me now.

29:56It's better for me to die.

29:58- He was probably very pale.

29:59He was one of those, one of those Judeans

30:03that's super redhead, very fair.

30:07- And then God says, is it right for you to be angry

30:11about the bush and he said, yes, angry enough to die.

30:14Then Adonai says, you're concerned about the bush

30:16for which you did not labor and which you did not grow.

30:19It came into being in a night in Paris in a night

30:22and should I not be concerned about Nineveh,

30:24that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons

30:27who do not know their right hand from their left,

30:30and also a bunch of cattle.

30:33They have mercy on the cattle, Jonah.

30:39And literally, that's the end of the book.

30:41- And that, yes, the endeth the book of Jonah.

30:45- Yeah, and also much cattle.

30:47Like, honestly, again, I had to read this

30:51like six or seven times in different translations,

30:55and I still don't have a handle

30:56on what the Lord is trying to say here,

30:58which is something along the lines of,

31:01look, you are, how is he relating the bush/gourd to Nineveh?

31:09I am not making that metaphor a leap.

31:13- The idea is that Jonah is so upset

31:16about the destruction of such a small thing,

31:19but is looking forward to the destruction

31:21of such a big thing.

31:23And God's like, you really want all these people to die?

31:27And also this cattle?

31:29- And so it's-- - And the cows.

31:30What about the cows?

31:32- Yeah, what about the cattle, Jonah?

31:34You never think of the cattle.

31:38- So it's again, mixing this kind of rhetorical finger wagging

31:43at people who want God to be vindictive

31:46with a little bit of satire, with a little bit of parody.

31:49'Cause we're enjoying making fun of Jonah.

31:53But there's also a message there.

31:55God is forgiving.

31:56God, are you right to want God to be vindictive and to kill?

32:05And so it is, I think it's a pretty biting satire

32:10on the prophetic genre, which so frequently is all about

32:13condemning everybody else to destruction.

32:16And here it's kind of poking fun at that

32:20and also saying, no, it's better to believe in a merciful God

32:25and our God is merciful.

32:27- Okay, and changes his mind apparently.

32:30- And also change, yeah.

32:32- And with that, I think that'll be a good segue point

32:36to get to another idea of ways that God can act.

32:41So let's move on.

32:44- Okay.

32:45- All right, well, here we are.

32:46We're discussing the nature, the character

32:51of the God of the Bible.

32:54And I'm just gonna start this off with two different verses.

33:00We'll start with Titus 1, verse two.

33:03- Okay.

33:04- Which says that in the hope of eternal life

33:08that God who cannot lie promised before time began.

33:13And then I'll also give us Hebrews 6, verse 18,

33:19which says, "So that through two unchangeable things

33:25"in which it is impossible for God to lie,

33:28"we who have fled for refuge might have a strong encouragement

33:33"to seize the blah, blah, blah."

33:34Anyway, both of them make it very clear.

33:37God cannot lie, it is impossible for God to lie,

33:41take it away, Dan.

33:44- And we saw the same thing in Numbers where Balaam says,

33:49God is not a human, that he will lie

33:53or a man that he will change his mind.

33:55- So very clear, I guess that's the end of the segment.

33:59Well, it's obvious that God doesn't lie,

34:02it says so multiple times, end of discussion.

34:06- And then we've got other parts of the Bible

34:08'cause there are other parts of the Bible

34:10and those other parts of the Bible frequently complicate

34:13attempts to assert that one part of the Bible

34:15governs all of the Bible.

34:17So I think we've got a lie pretty early on

34:20in the Hebrew Bible.

34:22At the very least we have God saying something will happen

34:26and then that thing just doesn't happen.

34:28- Right.

34:29- And I have characterized this particular

34:33not happening thing as a lie.

34:35- And I will say, you've gotten stitched about it

34:41numerous times.

34:43People are mad all over TikTok

34:46for this assertion of yours and so we're gonna dive into it.

34:51- Yeah, people seem to be a lot more upset about me

34:53saying the God of the Bible lies than pointing out

34:56that the God of the Bible seems to enjoy slavery

34:58and polygamy and things like that.

35:00So we have in Genesis two the creation of the human

35:05and in verse 16 the Lord God commanded the man saying

35:09of every tree of the garden, you can certainly eat

35:13or you will eat.

35:15And this uses a construction that is known in Hebrew

35:18as the parentomastic infinitive and you don't have

35:21to suddenly put your linguist caps on.

35:23But basically we have an infinitive version of a verb

35:27followed immediately by the finite version of the verb.

35:31So an English equivalent would be here,

35:33it would be to eat, you will eat.

35:36This means nothing in English.

35:38But this has the force of the rhetorical force

35:42of kind of emphasizing the certainty that something

35:46will happen and there are a bunch of nuances

35:48that can be added to this.

35:49But then we get to verse 17 where God tells the human

35:53but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

35:56you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it

36:01you shall certainly die.

36:05And here the Hebrew is Moat Tamoot.

36:08So it's that same parentomastic infinitive to die

36:11you will die insisting that the death is certain.

36:17Okay, you're gonna eat, you're gonna eat some things

36:20but if you eat that thing you are definitely going to die

36:23on that day.

36:24Yes, and it is five words in Hebrew.

36:28(speaking in foreign language)

36:32In the day, on the day you eat from it,

36:35you will certainly die.

36:37So then we've got the rest of what happens

36:39in the famous story of the Garden of Eden.

36:43Spoiler alert, spoiler alert, they go ahead and eat.

36:47(laughing)

36:48Yes, I think it's been enough years.

36:52There was evidently in my little video with Joel McHale

36:55there was a spoiler alert about the succession show

36:59and I didn't pick up on that

37:01but a lot of people jumped on my case for that

37:03and I was like, I thought this was in the past enough

37:05but if the story of Adam and Eve is not in the past enough

37:10then you're listening to the wrong show.

37:13Yeah, that one goes back far enough.

37:15If you haven't read it, that's on you.

37:18That's 100% your fault.

37:22Now we get the creation of Eve.

37:25Eve talks to the serpent who says

37:28and it starts off by saying the serpent was wiser

37:32or a craftier if you prefer

37:35then all the other wild animals

37:37that's Adonai the deity had made.

37:41And to be clear, we're not talking about the devil.

37:43We're talking about-- We are not talking about Satan

37:44or the devil, this is just one of the animals

37:46that God made. Just an animal.

37:48It may not be a serpent as we now know it.

37:50It may have had legs 'cause it's not crawling

37:54on the ground just yet. Right, not yet.

37:56And the serpent says to the woman,

37:58so did God really say you can't eat

38:02from any of the trees of the garden?

38:03And she says, no, we can eat the fruit

38:05of the trees of the garden.

38:06By God said, you shall not eat from the fruit

38:10of the tree that is in the midst of the garden

38:12nor shall you touch it or you shall die.

38:14And this is not exactly what God said

38:18to Adam, to the human.

38:20This is a slight change where we have this addition

38:24of you shan't even touch it.

38:28And there've been a lot of speculation about,

38:31you know, did Adam misreport the thing?

38:35Did Adam or did God tell Eve and then Eve

38:39is paraphrasing?

38:40Did God tell it to Eve differently?

38:44Nobody knows, really, it doesn't matter in the long run.

38:47In the story, Eve tells it a little differently,

38:49but then the serpent responds, you will not die.

38:54God knows that when you eat of it,

38:57and I think, let me look at the Hebrew, yeah,

38:59on the day you eat of it, your eyes will be open

39:03and you will be like the gods knowing good and evil.

39:08So the serpent says, hey, God's really just playing

39:12with you because God doesn't want something to happen.

39:16That's going to happen if you eat the fruit.

39:19And then the woman eats the fruit

39:21and gave some to her husband who was with her.

39:25And I've talked about this in some of my social media content.

39:28Some translations of the Bible omit the fact

39:30that the Hebrew very clearly states

39:32that her husband was with her as a way to kind of blame Eve.

39:37And he ate, and then the very next sentence says,

39:41"Then the eyes of both of them were open,

39:44"and they knew that they were naked,

39:45"and they sowed fig leaves together

39:47"and made loincloths for themselves."

39:48So what the serpent said would happen

39:51happened immediately upon eating the fruit.

39:53Their eyes were opened,

39:55and we get later on in verse 22 of chapter three,

40:00God says, look, and I think he's talking only about the man.

40:05Yes, look, the man has become like one of us

40:10to no good and evil.

40:12Now lest he put forth his hand

40:14and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever,

40:17let's kick him out.

40:19Yeah, you got to now 'cause all of the lies

40:21about what will happen to you if you eat that fruit,

40:24the jig is up.

40:26You gotta kick him out at this point.

40:27Yeah, and so there's some interesting things

40:29to point out here.

40:31It seems the serpent was right at least about saying,

40:35God's really doing this so that you don't become

40:39like the gods by having your eyes open

40:41by knowing good and evil.

40:43The text explicitly has God acknowledged

40:45that they became precisely what the serpent said they would,

40:50and that's something that God doesn't want.

40:52And so to prevent some additional thing

40:54that God doesn't want, namely them living forever,

40:57which would be one of the two prototypical features

41:01of deity, all knowledge and immortality,

41:04they're gonna kick him out.

41:05Now, this is after the curses have been announced.

41:10So the curses are that the serpent

41:13will slither on its belly, will eat dust.

41:17The curse to the woman is that she will have pain

41:19and conception and in childbirth.

41:21The curse to the man is that he will eat his food

41:24by the sweat of his brow and the ground is cursed

41:28because of you and from dust you are

41:31and to dust you will return.

41:33What doesn't happen on that day?

41:35- Yeah, there seems to be one conspicuous thing.

41:39- Omission, yeah.

41:40- That doesn't occur.

41:42- They don't die.

41:44- Yeah.

41:45- And a lot of people have tried to find

41:46a variety of different ways to rationalize this away,

41:51to harmonize verse 17 with the rest of the story.

41:54And this happened anciently.

41:56The book of Jubilees, which was probably written

41:58around the middle of the second century BCE,

42:00is actually the first to say,

42:03hey, what's really going on here

42:05is that a day is a thousand years according to the Lord,

42:08which is something that we see in the Proverbs

42:10and also something that comes up in one of Peter's epistles

42:14in the New Testament.

42:15Adam lived to be 930 years old.

42:18So in that day of the Lord of a thousand years

42:22within that time period, Adam died.

42:24So guess what?

42:26Mission accomplished.

42:27- On that thousand year day.

42:29- Yeah.

42:31- It's a Jupiter day.

42:32It's a, what planet rotates slowly, I don't know.

42:37- So we basically have in the ancient world

42:39attempts to try to make the two dots connect.

42:44- Right.

42:45- And then, so that's one of the techniques

42:48that people will use to try to insist that this was real.

42:52The most popular attempt to try to make the statement

42:56in verse 17 accurate is to say that Adam did die

43:01because death is separation from God

43:03and they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

43:05So on that day, they died.

43:07This doesn't work because Mot Tamut

43:11and the other different forms of that particular

43:14paranomastic infinitive that involve that verbal root.

43:18Though occur like 50 or 60 times,

43:21never once does it refer anything other

43:24than to straight up physical death.

43:26Sessation of your life.

43:29- So it's not, it's not used metaphorically

43:31or figuratively in any other context.

43:33- It's not a spiritual death.

43:35It's not separation from God.

43:38This statement, you will certainly die.

43:40Means precisely that you will certainly die.

43:43Now, the other attempt that is made

43:46to try to reconcile these two passages

43:48is to argue that Mot Tamut is used as a,

43:51as a sentencing to death.

43:56And so the idea is not that the death will actually occur,

44:00but that you will enter into some state of being doomed to die.

44:05Your death is imminent in some way, shape, or form.

44:08And so the idea there is that on that day,

44:12the certainty of their death was accomplished

44:17or something like that.

44:18But this doesn't really work either

44:21and there are a variety of different reasons for it.

44:24Most of them having to do with the fact

44:25that that sense of that construction in Hebrew

44:29does not occur anywhere in the entire Hebrew Bible.

44:33That is a sense that must be imposed upon the text.

44:37And here, based entirely on the conviction

44:39that if God says it in Genesis 2 17, then it must be true.

44:44However, we've already seen that God changes their mind.

44:48We saw that in Jonah, it is elsewhere

44:52in the Hebrew Bible as well.

44:54And so I think probably the best way

44:56to make sense of this passage

44:58is that God has been represented as a little capricious here,

45:03kind of getting a little trigger happy with these threats.

45:06And I've compared it to like a mom saying,

45:09"If you touch my sewing scissors, I will kill you."

45:12Or a dad saying, "If you touch my guitar

45:15"or if you touch my car again, I will kill you."

45:17And then they do it and they're like,

45:19"Ah, well, I have to punish you."

45:22And then coming up with something--

45:23That's it, you're banished from the house.

45:25You don't get to live here anymore.

45:27Yeah, I'm setting up this cherubim out in the front yard

45:31and he will mess you up.

45:34Don't try to get past him, he's got a flaming sword.

45:36Yeah, but it's always something short of the original threat,

45:41which I suggest is something that is a little hyperbolic.

45:46And so, yeah, I think if we understand a lie

45:51to be something that is intended to deceive,

45:54I think the idea here is that God was using the threat

45:58of immediate death to disincentivize them

46:02from eating of that tree.

46:04It didn't work and then God had to settle

46:07for all these other punishments.

46:10Yeah, it seems very clear that, yes,

46:15there was an untruth told in this moment.

46:21I guess I can imagine what that must mean

46:26to a lot of people who read those scriptures

46:31that I sort of led into this thing with

46:35that says, "It's impossible for God to lie, God cannot lie."

46:40I guess the framework has, in order to make sense of that,

46:49it's very easy if you're willing to acknowledge

46:52the multi-vocality, the fact that these accounts

46:57were written by different authors in different timeframes

47:01and it meant different, even the character

47:06of God meant different things to these different people

47:09as they went on, but I understand why people

47:13are so distressed when you point this out,

47:16when they've been taught and when they have committed

47:21to believing in a univocal or heaven forbid, inerrant Bible.

47:26You've got a direct contradiction here.

47:33Yeah, and those are just anathema within that worldview,

47:37which is one of the reasons that I think inerrancy

47:39is such a fatal flaw in a lot of Christian

47:44and even some conservative Jewish worldviews

47:47because it forces you into a position

47:49of having to just deny the plain reading of the text

47:54and come up with all this mental gymnastics

47:57to get around what is so clearly being stated in the text.

48:02But we have a, when we look at some of the precursors

48:06for this, like this is not unique within the literature

48:10of ancient Southwest Asia, in fact,

48:11there's this myth of Adapa where you have this figure

48:16who's kind of a grand human champion named Adapa

48:20and they end up, they get upset with the wind

48:22while they're on their ship and they break the wind

48:26and this upsets some gods.

48:29And so Adapa is called on to account.

48:33I forget what the saying is called under the carpet

48:37by the gods and one of the gods tells Adapa

48:40before he heads up there,

48:42hey, donate the food of death that they're going to offer you.

48:46And Adapa is all wise.

48:48The text says Adapa is wise

48:51and now the other issue is mortality.

48:55The God says donate the food of death.

48:57He goes up, the gods offer him the food of life

49:00which would make him immortal,

49:01but he remembers what the other deity said.

49:04He refuses the food of life

49:06and so is unable to achieve immortality

49:10and is sent back down to earth as a mortal.

49:14And so in a story that many scholars have suggested

49:17likely influence the development of the story

49:21of Adam and Eve, we have a deity telling Adapa

49:26the human something that ends up denying

49:30that human access to immortality

49:33and that thing that the deity told the human

49:35was not accurate.

49:36And so even in a likely precursor in some way, shape

49:40or form to the story of the garden of Eden,

49:44we have deception or at least inaccurate information

49:48on the part of the deity.

49:49And there's a book by a friend of mine, John E. Anderson,

49:54he wrote a book called Jacob and the Divine Trickster,

49:57a theology of deception and Adonai's fidelity

50:00to the ancestral promise in the Jacob cycle.

50:03There's scholarship on the fact that the notion of a trickster,

50:07the notion of someone who can manipulate others

50:10to get what they want is idealized

50:13in some ancient Southwest Asian literature

50:16including in parts of the Bible

50:19where Jacob has to deceive and Abraham has to deceive

50:23in order to advance their interests.

50:26And in some cases, God is telling them to do this.

50:29So that the ancestral promise can be fulfilled.

50:32And so we have the deity represented

50:35as willing to bend and break the truth

50:37so that their own prophecies and their own promises

50:41can come to pass.

50:43- Well, and remind me what story I'm thinking of.

50:47There's a story of God sending a prophecy

50:52to a prophet that is specific

50:56or one of God's messengers says,

50:58I'll go and I'll deceive the prophet to so that

51:03the bad thing happens to them in your name, right?

51:08What am I thinking of here?

51:10- So this is the story of Makiah and King Ahab.

51:15So Ahab wants to know if he's gonna go up

51:17to Ramot Gilead to do battle.

51:20And Ahab has all his court prophets.

51:24And he says, should I go up?

51:26And they all say, yes, yes, you should go up.

51:28You'll be fine.

51:31And then he says, what about that Makiah loser, that guy,

51:35he really gets under my skin.

51:37And he invites Makiah out and says, shall I go up?

51:39And Makiah's like, yeah, yeah, go up.

51:43Adam and I will deliver you.

51:45And he's like, mmm, I told you,

51:47this guy never tells me the truth.

51:49Why don't you tell me the truth?

51:51And then Makiah says, you know,

51:52I saw the Lord sitting on their throne

51:55surrounded by all the hosts of heaven.

51:57And God said, who will go and dice Ahab

52:00up to Ramot Gilead for me?

52:02And a spirit came forth.

52:04And actually the Hebrew says Haruach, the spirit,

52:08came forth and said, I will go and be a lying spirit

52:11in the mouth of his prophets so that he will go up

52:13and will fall at Ramot Gilead.

52:16And Adam and I says, I like it, go do it.

52:20And so Makiah is telling the king, God is lying to you

52:25through your prophets because God wants you to die.

52:31And then one of the people, one of Ahab's assistants

52:36slaps Makiah and says, are you gonna speak

52:40to the Lord's anointed that way?

52:42And kind of as a rhetorical question asks,

52:48is like which way did the Spirit of the Lord go?

52:53Something like that.

52:55But identifies Haruach--

52:56- Did he do any crazy Ivans?

52:58(laughing)

53:00- And he basically identifies this spirit

53:03as the Spirit of the Lord.

53:06And so the idea there is that God sent God's very own spirit

53:11to go lie to the court prophets, to deceive Ahab

53:15to his death.

53:16So there are multiple parts of the Bible

53:19that represent the God of Israel

53:22as having no compunction whatsoever with deception

53:25and with lying.

53:26- Yeah, it's a tricky one.

53:29It says, you know, these are God's prophets,

53:32they're doing their job, they're actually getting it right.

53:34They're saying exactly what God told him to say.

53:37Don't go up on that hill, don't go up on that hill though.

53:42Well, there you go.

53:44- Thank you so much for that, we're gonna get some letters.

53:49And you're welcome to write into us.

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54:30We'll talk to you again next week.

54:32- Bye everybody.

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