Ep 73: Bible Magic!

00:00Throughout the ancient world, everybody just seemed to presuppose that, yeah, there's magic out there; there's witchcraft works.

00:07It's just a matter of trying to suggest that when we do it, the person on the other end of the line is righteous; when they're doing it, it's demons.

00:14Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

00:20And I'm Dan Beecher.

00:21And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion

00:29and combat the spread of misinformation about the same.

00:33How are things today, Dan?

00:35Things are good. Things are good. It's my birthday.

00:39So I'm just chilling here. I just stepped foot into my 50th year.

00:46Oh, wow.

00:47I'm not 50, to be clear. I'm 49.

00:5149, okay.

00:52But that begins, you know, you start at zero, and you don't get that one until that first whole year has gone by.

01:01So this means of counting is backwards looking.

01:04Yes.

01:05Yes.

01:06Well, congratulations. Happy birthday.

01:08Thank you.

01:09By the time this goes out, you will have been a couple of weeks into that 50th year, you will be gaining all kinds of experience.

01:17I'll be a wise old man by the way. Right now I'm just a young spry doofus, but soon the wisdom is going to hit.

01:26It hits a 50, right? That's what it kicks in.

01:28That's what I heard. Yeah, it comes flooding in. The floodgates are open. You get the key to unlock all those doors.

01:34Thank goodness. So speaking of wisdom, today we're going to be talking about, and also speaking of like magical things happening.

01:44Like wisdom just magically occurring at 50. Magic's the theme of the show, man. We're going to be talking about some awesome.

01:53You know, we've had people on Patreon and other places ask us about various sort of magic that appears in the Hebrew Bible,

02:03including magical implements and various things. So we're going to dive into that to begin with.

02:10And then we're going to zero in on something very specific that's sort of of that realm.

02:16An archaeological find, if I'm not mistaken. An archaeological find. Yeah, we're actually going to talk about

02:22the single earliest witness to any text in the Hebrew Bible, and it is a magical text.

02:31Interesting. Yes, yes. I like it. Yeah. All right, well, let's start with some magical thinking.

02:41Yeah, I think it would be helpful first to talk a little bit about the concept of magic as we understand it,

02:50and as we use it particularly in relation to the Bible, because there are an awful lot of people who understand magic to be something that other people do.

03:00Basically, it's religious stuff that I don't like, is magic. Just like a cult is a religion I don't like.

03:09Magic is the bibbidi-bopity-boo that I don't like, because when I go bibbidi-bopity-boo, well, that's just priesthood,

03:19or that's just God, or that's just a miracle or something like that, but it's not magic.

03:25And so the distinction between what might be called priesthood authority or God's authority or something like that,

03:35and magic is an arbitrary one. It is one that is drawn by the folks who are involved in it or against it.

03:44And I can see why the word magic would end up feeling maybe disrespectful or somehow dismissive, but I don't think that's how we want to use that word now.

03:56I don't feel like we want to be dismissive or disrespectful of what we're going to talk about.

04:02No, not at all.

04:04But yeah, I mean, I think that these practices and sort of implements objects that are imbued with God's power or imbued with some sort of power,

04:18these are all things that, I mean, they're certainly not exclusive to Judaism, Christianity, et cetera, but they are present there and present in the Bible.

04:28And how do you talk about them without using, you know, without, I suppose we could find other words, but magic is the right word.

04:36It's what's happening. So let's get into where we're at. Like, what kinds of things are we talking about?

04:43Well, I think there are, I identify, someone might be able to identify more, but just off the top of my head since we started the show,

04:51I've thought I can identify three different kinds of brands of magical stuff going on in the Bible.

04:59One is magic associated with divination. How can we tell God's will what God wants?

05:07There are a variety of different ways to do this. And even when people think about like dark magic and, and, you know, the magic you might see in a TV show,

05:17frequently it has to do with telling the future or with trying to discern the will of some entity or another.

05:25So divination is a type of magic. And then we've got a type of magic that is called sympathetic magic.

05:31And this is where you're actually trying to control things in the world.

05:36And we actually talked about a brand of that when we talked about Jacob working for Laban to get his wives when he was ret to go.

05:47And he wanted to, and he made a deal with Laban about him taking all the spotted and speckled sheep and goats and stuff.

05:57He went and took a bunch of sticks and peeled the bark off and ripped them to make them spotted and speckled and then put them in watering troughs while certain animals were there and then took them out while others were not there to influence

06:13their litters to influence the kinds of animals they would give birth to. So that's a kind of sympathetic magic where you create something that is supposed to have some kind of metaphysical connection to some kind of outcome.

06:28And then we have what now we've just thought of four. We have imprecatory magic as well. And that's where you're trying to harm other folks. And so if one thinks of, I think the first one that pops into my head is Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with the doll.

06:45And we have clay dolls from ancient Southwest Asia and Egypt where they write curses on them and then smash them. And that's supposed to affect other folks.

06:58And the late 20th century we're told was a voodoo thing, but actually has nothing to do with voodoo. But there you go. Absolutely. So we've got the sympathetic, we've got the divination and then we've got the imprecatory and then there's the apatrapaic.

07:22And apatrapaic is a $2 word that refers to warding off evil.

07:27So we've talked about this in context in the context of our episode about Lilith. Did we not? There was an apatrapaic amulet that was there to protect against, was it to protect against Lilith coming and getting you?

07:43Yeah. So this was something that's dates to between 700 and 1000 CE. So we're getting in on the medieval period. And this was this idea that this amulet, if it had these three angels names on it, Sanoy, San Sanoy and Samangaloth, then Lilith would not be able to kill your newborn.

08:03And so that was probably an etiology, an origin story for the use of this amulet as an apatrapaic or a protective amulet for the baby.

08:13And so we have all kinds of apatrapaic magic going on as well. In fact, what we're going to talk about in the second part of the show is going to be apatrapaicism.

08:22It's going to be about warding off evil. But for the first part of the show, we're going to talk about divination and particularly associated with two things.

08:32They can be separate or together, and usually English speakers know them by Urim M. Thummim and Hebrew Urim Vetumim.

08:43And these are tools of divinization, excuse me, that might be another type of magic, tools of divination, in other words, a way to discern God's will.

08:57And so when we did our episode on the necromancer of Eindor, there's the introduction to that story.

09:07It says that Saul was seeking the Lord's will related to whether or not he should go up to battle.

09:14And it says he could not find an answer from the prophets or through the Urim and Thummim.

09:21So he had access to this tool of divination, and it just wasn't working. He gave it the bop. He gave it the Nintendo blow.

09:31He did all of that, and he still was not getting the answers he was looking for.

09:36I mean, he probably, the moisture probably actually damaged the environment.

09:42If you don't do it, don't do the blow.

09:45You don't want to get the Mountain Dew fumes in there.

09:49Yeah, I remember reading that like Saul, matter of fact, I have it pulled up here in 1 Samuel 14, verse 41, where Saul prayed to the Lord.

09:59Why have you not answered your servant today?

10:03If the fault is in me or in my son, Jonathan, respond with Urim, but if the men of Israel are at fault, respond with Thummim.

10:12So it was like a binary system. If the blue light comes on, then we know that it's this, and if the red light comes on.

10:21Do we know what this looked like? What this Urim and Thummim was? Because it was part of a breastplate, right?

10:27We don't really have an idea what form it took, because it doesn't really describe it.

10:32It only ever refers to either Urim or Thummim or Urim and Thummim together.

10:37But it was something that went into the breastplate somewhere, and sometimes it seems to overlap with the stones that were put in the breastplate or on the shoulders.

10:49So it's not consistent.

10:51So we have in Numbers 27, 21, 1 Samuel 28, 6, and then there are like five other references to just the Urim all by itself, which was some kind of object that facilitated divination.

11:06And then you find Urim and Thummim together in Exodus 28.30, Leviticus 8.8, Deuteronomy 33.8, Ezra 263, Nehemiah 7.65.

11:16Interesting.

11:17And there were even scholars for a long time who thought that these were not actually physical objects, but that they were abstractions.

11:25I'm just forever now going to think of them as a red and a blue light right over the net. That's to me.

11:31Well, here's the thing. There is ancient Jewish tradition associated with the Urim and Thummim, which by the way, these are two Hebrew words.

11:39They're both in the plural that mean lights and perfections.

11:43However, in the plural, you can create abstractions by putting nouns in the plural.

11:49And so it could mean illumination and perfection in the abstract sense.

11:56But again, there are several passages that seem to reflect the idea that these are physical objects that were means of divination.

12:05And so in Exodus, and even in a bunch of other places, the idea is that they go in the breastplate of judgment that was worn by Aaron,

12:16which was 12 different stones on it. It's to be woven together from linen and wool, wink, wink, and gold and other things.

12:27And then there's supposed to be like a pocket in there.

12:30And there is ancient Jewish tradition that these stones actually illuminated.

12:35Wow.

12:36That there was some kind of way that they lit up to indicate the will of God.

12:43Or that when they lit up that indicated that the will of God was being communicated, if maybe by some other means.

12:51And there is some tradition that suggests the letters.

12:54It would spell stuff out.

12:56Oh, it's like an LED display.

12:59Yeah, something like that.

13:01Yeah, we don't know if it projected.

13:03It feels like the bat signal.

13:05So you had the Adonai signal that would light up the clouds.

13:09Or if it's just a chest-mounted jumbotron sort of situation.

13:14Yeah, and if it was a clear night and there were no clouds, then you were SOL.

13:19Yeah, exactly.

13:20But yeah, it is some kind of means of divination.

13:25And because it does not describe exactly what's going on in the Hebrew Bible, everybody is just kind of making stuff up.

13:32But we have later rabbinic texts that talked about, for instance, one, the Babylonian Yoma 73A states to between the 3rd and the 5th centuries CE.

13:47When asked how were the Yerim and Themium inquired of?

13:51And the answer comes, the inquirer had his face directed to him who was consulted.

13:56And the latter directed himself to the divine presence.

14:00And so there is linking with temple symbolism and imagery and stuff like that.

14:08And they would either some stuff would come into their mind or it would light up.

14:15And then there's even there's some Jewish tradition that suggests that the stones on the breastplate were the Yerim and Themium.

14:23Or the two that went over the shoulder were the Yerim and Themium.

14:28And then Josephus actually talks about this as God declared.

14:33So, Josephus is writing in the 90s CE.

14:36Okay.

14:37And he's captured during the war when Rome destroys Jerusalem.

14:42Josephus was the, sorry, the Jewish historian who then, and then, oh, sorry, you're telling the story.

14:50Yeah, yeah.

14:51But he was a Jewish descent.

14:53Right. And, and they capture him and he's like, I could be of use to you guys.

14:58And he basically writes the stories, histories about Judaism in a way that's intended to kind of represent Judaism to the Roman Empire in a good light.

15:10But he says in one part, God declared beforehand by those 12 stones, which the high priest bear on his breast and which were inserted into his breastplate when Israel should be successful in battle.

15:21For so great a splendor shown forth from them before any army began to march that all the people were sensible of God's being present for their assistance.

15:31And so here the idea is that it's, it's basically a binary thing.

15:36It's a yes or a no.

15:37Should we go out to battle?

15:39Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

15:40That's a yes.

15:41And that, and then, you know, if you see the priest walking around and he's just beaming light, then they were like, oh, man, we're going to be here.

15:50They were like, oh, man, we're going to win today.

15:52Got a good feeling.

15:53Got a good feeling about this match.

15:54This is going to go great.

15:56Yeah.

15:57And so in that sense, it's, it's, it's kind of woven into the idea of this war palladium, the representation of God's presence and approbation of going into, into battle.

16:09Little did they know that the Moabite priest's chest was also glowing.

16:15That didn't go great.

16:17Yeah. And then the Philistines brought out their fish God, right?

16:20Who actually has nothing to do with being a fish.

16:23And then we have, yeah, they would consult them before the war.

16:27And that's why Saul was going to, going to the prophets, going to consult the Urim.

16:32And it was silent.

16:34So, you know, if, if it like doesn't light up means no, lights up means yes.

16:39If it's broken, how do you not?

16:42Right.

16:43Be like, that's a no.

16:44I'm not really.

16:45Are you answering?

16:47No.

16:48Like twice for yes and once for now.

16:51Yeah.

16:52And then we've got.

16:53Well, that's why that's why you need both.

16:55That's why you need the Urim and the Thummim so that you have, so that you can have one for, you know, one of them is the Urim is the primary.

17:03The primary.

17:04Yeah.

17:05Oh, yeah.

17:06Except you just don't drop them and then be like, Oh, shoot, which one was which.

17:09Right.

17:10Hopefully they look different.

17:12Yeah. And then in the Dead Sea Scrolls, they're mentioned a handful of times, including in the temple scroll of 11 q 19, which says the king must not go to battle prior to coming to the high priest to inquire of him about the judgment of the Urim and Thummim.

17:28So we end the right.

17:29We just put on my rocks.

17:31I got.

17:32I got to put on my rocks to know.

17:35Yeah.

17:36And, you know, within the Latter-day Saint tradition, the Urim and Thummim is picked up as basically a peepstone.

17:44That's what they're saying.

17:45Oh, that's the Urim and Thummim, which to be honest is not far off.

17:50I mean, there's certainly an awful lot of overlap in the functioning of certainly a divination thing.

17:58Right.

17:59Divination was huge in the in the 1800s and like all through like we think of it as, you know, we're talking about it in an ancient context, but it continued till and continues like I still see people dowsing for to find water.

18:19Yeah.

18:20And that sort of thing.

18:21It doesn't work, but people do it and they swear by it.

18:24A lot of people swear by it.

18:26Well, and when you think about it, frequently, when you hear stories about the efficacy of prayer, particularly within the Latter-day Saint tradition, you sometimes hear stories about, oh, I lost this thing and I decided to kneel down and say a prayer.

18:43And then I was shown where it was in my mind or and then the next place I looked was it or something like that, which is just divination.

18:51Yeah.

18:52So it's mediated by prayer. It's basically dematerializing the object, the facilitator of divination.

19:02Right.

19:03No, we do it with our voice rather than with a rock or with a particularly shiny rock.

19:09It's we're still doing the exact same thing.

19:12Yeah.

19:13I mean, think of you think of all the people who are very into the healing powers of crystals or whatever.

19:19Yeah.

19:20That is again, you take an object that is a shiny, pretty rock.

19:24Yep.

19:25And you and you imbue it with various power.

19:28Yeah.

19:29Whether having to do with frequencies or with anything like that, you can imagine the high priest with the 12 different stones on his chest, people are like, oh gosh, here he comes again with his Christmas.

19:44This one has rose quartz and that's good for healing. And this one is smoky quartz and that is.

19:51DoTERRA would have made a killing.

19:56Wait, we said we weren't going to be disrespectful. Let's keep going.

20:00We lied. We're going to be a little disrespectful sometimes for fun.

20:08We distinguish what is good divination from bad divination basically on who we think is on the other end of the line.

20:16Right.

20:17And so we have divination in the Hebrew Bible as well as in the New Testament.

20:22How did they choose the apostle that was going to take Judas's place?

20:27They rolled dice.

20:29They cast lots.

20:31And so, but because it was at an eye on the other end of the line, it's like, this is okay. It's okay when we do it.

20:39And this raises interesting questions about the intercession of angels within early and even contemporary brands of Christianity as well as within some brands of Judaism, you have a lot of attempts to appeal to other entities besides God.

20:57Jesus was doing that as well. There's one of the reasons that or one of the criticisms of Christianity among some early Jewish folks was, "Hey, that's the wrong person on the other end of the divinatory line.

21:10We've got to have Adonai on the other end." And the Christians were just like, "Well, what if he is Adonai? Did you ever think about that?"

21:19Yeah. And I mean, that is a time-honored tradition. People accusing, even you look at Christians accusing different brands of Christians of your thing isn't working or isn't valid because it's not the right version of our belief system or whatever.

21:42That happens a lot. And then witchcraft is just a variation on sympathetic magic and divination and things like that, although it's frequently aimed at kind of a generic faceless divine agency out there that is not named and personified and represented in most cases.

22:04In some cases it is, but in most cases it's not. So Christians and folks who are in the Bible trying to seek God's will are doing the same kinds of things that any other people engaged in divination are doing.

22:19They just feel like there's one object of our inquiry that's appropriate and anybody else is inappropriate, which is just about exclusivity more than it is about any kind of innate fundamental ethical or moral qualities associated with them.

22:37Well, and as you said, like it seems like at least some of this, so like Urim and Thummim seem to be like direct lines to two Adonai or whatever, but then you get, there's a lot of like gray area.

22:53You talked about the, what you said, the necromancer, I still like the witch of Endor just because it sounds really fun. And I'm, and I'm, yes, it's true I am still picturing an e-walk. But the, the, you know, she was practicing this practice that worked that had that that

23:15was an effective magic. Yeah. And it's, you know, it had been banned by Saul. Was it Saul that banned it? Yeah.

23:26But that didn't mean that God had banned it and it clearly worked. So I mean, it, it, one would think God approved question mark, God disapproved question mark. It seems to be in gray area.

23:39Well, and this, and this raises, this raises an interesting point about the conceptualization of magic and the disapproval of non, non godly magic, let's, let's say, or unsanctioned.

23:54Yeah. What is presupposed throughout all of it, whether you're talking about pharaohs magicians who successfully turn staffs into snakes, or you're talking about the necromancer of Endor, or you're talking about anything else, the presupposition is that the world is chock full of invisible

24:14forces that we can access if you know the right words, if you have the right materials, if you have the right ingredients and recipes. In other words, it's all true.

24:26It's just a question of what you're allowed to go out and take advantage of. And for the Bible, it nowhere says, like, if it didn't work in their perception, they wouldn't have to ban it or prohibit it.

24:43They wouldn't have to say, no, don't go consult with the deceased if nobody ever got anything out of it. But the Bible represents consulting with the deceased as working, as doing exactly what they're.

24:59So, throughout the ancient world, everybody just seemed to presuppose that, yeah, there's magic out there. There's witchcraft works. It's all, it all works. It's just a matter of trying to suggest that when we do it, it's with the person on the other end of the line is righteous.

25:16But when they're doing it, it's demons. Right. Everybody is demons, and even when you get down into the New Testament, Paul is saying that an idol is nothing, but it represents, or it's a conduit to demons.

25:32So they're out there and they can do what they are sought after to do, but you're not allowed to do that.

25:38I don't don't, but don't. Yeah, I think I mean, I guess that is that has been the the bugaboo of magic since time immemorial is just what's okay magic and what's not magic.

25:52I think we're in a much more interesting moment in history where I think we're starting to stop. We're believing less and less in magic as we get more and more sort of scientific and more and more good explanations for weird phenomena in the world or whatever.

26:12But I do think that it is that, yeah, that seems to be the crux of it is just like, who's doing it? Who are they in whose name are they doing it?

26:23And it's not even like, are you trying to hurt somebody or help somebody? Like if that were the criterion, like I could understand that a little bit more, but if it's like, you know, you're allowed to curse somebody in God's name, you're not allowed to bless somebody in Ashera's name or something like that.

26:38It's like, what do we really need to be getting upset about that? Does that not just come down to the jealousy of God and saying, I'm the only one, you're not allowed to.

26:49Yeah, that is an interesting distinction. You can't do good for others. Yeah, if it's in the wrong name. I had that hadn't really occurred to me, but yeah, it definitely seems that that is a

27:03thing. Yeah, that's what it's about who's being glorified in the moment. Yeah. And I think this fundamentally comes down to an us versus them distinction, whatever we do is good, whatever they do is bad.

27:19And our gods are good, whether, you know, whether we're Roland dice or looking at shiny rocks. If anybody else does it, even if it's to help someone, including helping us.

27:32It's wrong because they're not us. They're them. Yeah. Well, there you go. That is a, I think, a good primer on the magic thing. Let's, let's get specific now and dive into.

27:47Cataphanom. Right. Cataphanom is a, it is a part of the Valley of Hinnom. It's a ridge part that's mostly rock. And there are a bunch of graves that were carved into the rock there. And you can go visit it.

28:04It's a fairly small area, but you can go see how they carved little channels in the rock where you're supposed to lay bodies and little circles up top where you put offerings and things like that. And then do we have a sense of the timeframe, the time period.

28:20This is going on in the Iron Age. So pre-exilic period all the way down to surely it would have been used afterwards as well. But we're talking like 8th, 8th, 7th century BCE. So this is where the Judah height rock cut tomb is kind of diagnostic of this time and place where you carve benches and repositories into the rock.

28:48That's where you lay bodies and they decompose and then you collect the bones and you throw them into the repository, which is where they all collect. And there's, and there's a, this idea of being gathered to the ancestors can be linked with the idea of once you're, when you're a single skeleton with or without flesh, you're an individual.

29:12But then once your bones get, you know, they're not connected anymore and they just get tossed into a heap of bones. You are no longer a single individual. Your identity has disintegrated and you have been gathered to the ancestors. You're now a generic ancestor.

29:30And so there's, there were phases of the afterlife based on the materiality of burial and then of mortuary interactions and things like that. But back in the 60s, somebody discovered in one of these tombs associated with a burial. Now a roof had collapsed in.

29:53And so there was some, it was difficult to distinguish some of the different layers. But they found two little scrolls of silver that were rolled up tight. And I'm talking little, little, like one of them's only an inch wide. The other is just over half an inch wide.

30:13And then one of them's only, and one of them's about four inches long, the other's about two inches long. But when they unrolled them, these little silver scrolls, they found, they noticed scratches on the inside of them and discovered that they had writing on them.

30:30And so these became known as the Cataffinom silver scrolls, and they're dated to about 600 BCE. So whoever was buried, they were probably buried around 600 BCE right around the time of the Babylonian exile, or at least the beginning of it.

30:48And what they discovered written on these scrolls was a version of what's known as the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers, chapter six, verses 24 through 26.

31:04And so this is the earliest known witness to any biblical text ever. And it comes from centuries before the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it's a version of the Priestly Blessing. It's not exactly the same as the Priestly Blessing.

31:22But a couple of interesting things about this. Scholars are pretty sure that the purpose of writing this Priestly Blessing on these scrolls and then rolling them up tight would have been as magical amulets, basically.

31:38One of those four kinds of magic that we talked about in the first segment, this would have been the Apache Payach sort, because it was, "May the Lord bless you and keep you." And that's basically promising protection. The word for "keep" can mean "watch" or "guard."

31:56And so it is a prayer for protection. But when you inscribe it on little silver scrolls and roll them up tight and put them in a little pouch, that's not designed to be read. That is functioning as an artifact, not as a text.

32:12And I talk in my book about how my book "Outernized Divine Image" is a cognitive approach, totally open access. You can go find the PDF online. About how inscribing the divine name, which has written the tetragrammaton, Yodhheh Vaveh, which has written at least seven times on the two scrolls,

32:31inscribing that materializes the divine name and pronouncing or materializing the divine name was thought to invoke the deity's presence and agency.

32:42And so if you write it a bunch and then roll it up tight and keep it on you, it's kind of a constant reminder that I've got the divine name with me, so I've got God's presence with me. And if that text that contains the divine name is saying, "Bless you, keep you, guard you, watch you, his face shine upon you" kind of stuff,

33:01you're basically every time you're walking and the thing bumps against your chest, it's like, "Ah yes, I have Adonai's protection, Adonai's guarding me, keeping me, watching me, Adonai's face is shining on me."

33:13And so it is functioning in a kind of magical way to remind you and give you a sense that you're being watched over by God, but then the person was buried with it, which indicates that it was probably also understood to protect

33:30and guard them through the afterlife, because they did think there was an afterlife and they did think there were entities in the afterlife who could mess you up.

33:41And so Adonai could also grant protection in the afterlife as well.

33:49And so the ketafenom silver scrolls are, in addition to being the earliest version of any text from the Bible, they're a piece of material magic, they're a piece of a patropaic, and a patropaic amulet in brief.

34:10And these are actually quite common around this time period. In fact, starting around 800 BCE, we begin to see a patropaic amulet spreading out from Egypt.

34:24And they're found in Phoenicia, they're found in Israel, they're found as far away as Greece, and they usually involve some kind of inscription and frequently some kind of iconography,

34:37like a drawing of a deity or a symbol for a deity, or maybe an animal that is associated with a deity.

34:45And so the goal is the same, the goal is to invoke the presence, the agency of a deity who can protect and can guard and watch over you.

34:57The thing that popped into my mind when you, sorry, I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but when you described this was a mazuzah, which is the Jewish tradition that continues to this day of writing on a scroll.

35:14And it's just, I think it's just versus from a Torah, from the Torah, and then you put it in a little thing and you keep that on your doorframe or whatever.

35:26Yeah, this is, they're a handful of texts that are inscribed, usually in very small lettering so that they can be rolled up tight and that that is put inside this, the vial or the cylinder that goes inside the container.

35:39And that is, yeah, put usually at an angle on the doorframe.

35:44And so, and it's doing the same thing, the idea here is to provide protection to everybody inside that door.

35:52Everybody in that household, but also usually when coming or going, you would, like, there was some kind of interaction with the mazuzah, whether you kiss your fingers and touch it or something like that.

36:04Which was a reflection of this hope that that protection would be with you while you're out in the world as well.

36:10And so this is doing, this is doing the same thing that divine images and particularly standing stones did in the ancient world because sometimes people would have standing stones in their house.

36:23And some, and many cities would have standing stones right outside the front gate.

36:29And this similarly was a way to signal to others, this city is dedicated to this particular deity and this particular deity is overlooking and guarding and watching out for this city.

36:42And so very, very similar stuff, but on a miniaturized scale.

36:47And you have, and you have those same texts are put in boxes that are put on the forehead when you have the, the phylacteries where the leather strap goes around the forehead and then around the left arm down to the hand.

37:00That kind of thing is, is doing the same kind of thing.

37:05We're invoking the divine presence divine agency, whether it is for protection or to facilitate some other kind of blessing.

37:14Right. So there are, and I wrote about the, the mazuzin in my book as, as well as an example of material media that used the inscription of the divine name as a catalyst for invoking divine presence.

37:31But this, this probably goes back to stamp seals.

37:35So a lot of people know that, anciently, you didn't have a signature, you had a little seal that had your name or some symbol or something like that, big king ranch with a, you know, horns on it or something.

37:49Right.

37:50And you would press that into wax or something like that in order to signify your possession, your ownership, your approbation, something like that.

37:58But we find some stamp seals that invoke the protection of certain deities, usually with symbols associated with protection or with protective deities.

38:09And so they are functioning kind of as a patropiac seals so personal seals and including there's, there's an interesting example, the letter omega was used frequently in association with, with childbirth.

38:28And the idea seems to be that, so from Mesopotamia to Judah we find the Greek Omega symbol, it was associated with miscarriage, and the symbol was often put on the graves of children.

38:43And there's no explanation of what's going on, but some scholars think that it might invoke protection of this child and they think the Omega symbol may represent the womb.

39:00Because it's two lines at the bottom, but basically a circle. Yeah, just think of an O, but the bottom is open, and the two lines that come around instead of meeting just kind of turn back and stick out on each side.

39:15And so it could be representative of a reasonable symbol for a womb, I guess.

39:21Yeah, and so some people think that those symbols are there because they're trying to invoke blessings on a womb or protection for miscarried children in the afterlife or something like that.

39:36But we have all kinds of iconography animals scorpions, for instance, are associated with, with certain types of protection. There was an amulet that was discovered at Mount Arbel, and our bell is this mountain cliff face that is on the west side of the Sea of Galilee.

40:00And if you ever get to go there, you got to go up to the top of Mount Arbel, it's the best view of the northern Galilee, but don't fall off, please.

40:09And they found this little pendant, and on one side of it, it has a Greek inscription that says the one God who conquers evil, and then it shows somebody on horseback, and they have a halo behind their head.

40:23With a spear, they are spearing, a female figurine that's laying on the bottom, and then there's a variation on the tetrogramaton written in Greek.

40:33And then on the backside, it says one God, and you've got this evil eye symbol.

40:39And this probably dates to the fifth of the sixth century CE, but it would have been understood as a protective amulet that had, it was a pendant, so it had a little thing with a hole in it for you to.

40:52Put your necklace through it or something like that, and you would wear that, and that would protect you from, you know, if anyone were trying to give you the evil eye or put a curse on you or something like that, that would protect you from that.

41:05In fact, in magical Greek papyrus, this is something that we find in the common era in ancient Greek as well as in late antique Greek you find a lot of papyrus with magic text written all over them.

41:22And like the people think that abracadabra, which is supposed to be this magical phrase, is based on an ancient Aramaic curse, and it's not.

41:31But there were lots of magical papyrus that would talk about different figures from the Bible, even pagan texts, where they're not Christian, they're not Jewish.

41:41A lot of them had the Greek letters, Iota Alpha Omega, which would be a Greek transliteration of how some people would have pronounced the divine name, the tetragrammaton.

41:54In fact, we find that precise spelling in the Dead Sea Scrolls in one of the Greek translations of Leviticus, in place of the divine name.

42:03And so that was used in more than any other divine name in Greek magical papyrus, you had the tetragrammaton used as a way of invoking protection and blessing and even curses and things like that.

42:17So the ancient world beyond just Judaism and Christianity into what we refer to as the pagan world, which is saturated with the notion that there are forces out there in the world.

42:32Earlier, some of them you can appeal to for divination or for cursing others, but overwhelmingly you want to do appeal to them to protect you from the other divine forces that were out there that someone else might try to throw at you.

42:49Yeah, I mean, it is fascinating. And again, like I love that you started this conversation with ideas of like what has come through to now because there's still so much of this.

43:08I think I think a lot of people hearing this would want to sort of poo poo ancient stuff or, you know, as being weird or as being like, well, that was obviously not real, but like, there's so much of this stuff that still occurs now and that, you know, every religion has variations of these.

43:31And I think it's interesting that you see among Christians today, you see a lot of concern for protecting yourself against the dark forces that are out there in the world and it's baffling to me how many people out there are just like Bobby Boucher's mom

43:48and think everything's the devil. Everything is demonic and you've got to protect yourself and usually it's, you know, you see it all the time on social media, pray this prayer to protect yourself.

44:01Or there are even folks who think that and I think we have plans to talk about this in another show that, you know, wearing certain kinds of fabrics will help heal you and will help protect you.

44:15And frequently prayer is kind of the replacement media for the, the amulets and things like that that went before.

44:26But there are a lot of people who think you've got to pronounce Jesus's name correctly in order to invoke to adequately invoke God's attention or God's protection or God's blessing.

44:39And if you don't say the name correctly, then you, you know, it doesn't work and this has, this is very closely related to the idea that we want to write God's name on these, these amulets, even if we're like going to draw a picture or something like that along with it.

44:55We need to have their name on it. And we found a very common way of doing this in the ancient world from like Carthage to Malta to Cyprus to all over is, is to have a little strips of gold or silver or something like that, and they would would draw like Egyptian deities, like a little parade of Egyptian deities and then they would write on there.

45:18It's Dave. And, you know, that was, you know, somebody probably paid a pretty penny for that and then they would carry that around with them and, and that would be that would made them feel like these Egyptian deities were who are protecting them.

45:35So one of the, one of my favorite artifacts of all time is comes from a place called Contillator Rude, and this is an inscription along with a drawing. And the drawing is of a male and a female deity, and they are drawn using imagery associated with Egyptian deities, one named Bess and the other named Besset.

45:55And these are protective deities. You wanted these deities around to protect you. And there's an inscription written, it's centered right over top of the headdress of the male deity.

46:06And it asks for blessings by Adonai and by his Ashara. And scholars, I am among those scholars who think that this is intentionally either interpreting or reinterpreting these two figures as Adonai, the God of Israel, and Adonai's Ashara.

46:26But it's doing the exact same thing. You got a little inscription, you've got a drawing of deities who are associated with protection and you're invoking their blessings to protect you, to guide you along the way, the same thing that is going on in number six, that God will watch over you and protect you.

46:44And I think even the, yeah, number 627 says they will put my name upon them, the children of Israel, and I will bless them. So the link between having the name there and having the blessings is pretty explicit.

46:59So this kind of, this kind of a patrapaic magic is found all over the ancient Mediterranean. It's found in the Bible. It's found in our artifacts. It is the way our earliest witness to the biblical texts was used. That's what it was there for.

47:20And some people think that that probably predated the working of the priestly blessing into the Book of Numbers that this may have been so originally that blessing may have just been a blessing that people wrote down and carried with them.

47:37And then somebody was like, "Hey, give me that thing over there. We need a blessing to write into the book of Numbers." Unroll your silver. I need padding for space here on my book. What was that blessing you said the other day? I liked that. Yeah, let's put that in here.

47:51So that's a possibility. The other possibility is that the Book of Numbers was in place already and somebody was like, "I like that blessing. Hey, man, can you write this blessing onto this silver scroll for me so I can wad it up and I can carry it around a little amulet and one day I'll be buried with it?"

48:09It works either way. It works either way. Yeah, it's sixes. Tomato tomato. And so while today we tend to think of this as parochial and hokey and something that good Christians or even good Jewish people don't do, or at least some people present it that way, this is very much in the air.

48:33Oh my gosh. Bible was being written. This is... Think about it. This was just as natural as slavery was back then. This was not something you questioned.

48:41It's still just as natural. You have talked a lot about the psychological aspects of religion. What do you call it? What's your thing?

48:54I've got a few things. Cognitive science of religion. That's where I'm trying to get at. When you think about it, you want something to protect you when you're in a scary moment.

49:05When a Christian who's wearing a cross or a crucifix around their neck, when they're in a scary moment, they grab for that. You know what I mean? That is the same thing. It may not immediately be thinking, "I'm invoking the magic powers of this thing."

49:25Or even the image of holding a cross up to a vampire, which is... I think most people don't believe in vampires, but psychologically we're still doing the same thing.

49:40I will be vulnerable right now and share a story that I don't think I've ever shared before. Most people know me know that I do not like flying. If there are any bumps at all, I am not happy.

49:55And I first discovered this when I was 19, and my grandmother flew my brother in me over to Germany, and we spent a summer bumming around Germany. And I've got some cool stories from that. But I remember somebody had given me a cross on a necklace.

50:15I was not religious at all at the time, but I had it with me, and I remember on the flight back, it was rough. It was a bumpy flight. And I was just like, a light bulb went off, and I rough went into my backpack, grabbed this cross, and I just put almost permanent imprint of that cross on my palm because I was squeezing the crap out of that thing.

50:38Not because I believed anything was going to happen, but it allowed me to focus on something material that just intuitively I was like, "This is helping."

50:49And there are tons of data that show that having something material can help, which is one of the things that I think Protestantism shot itself in the foot.

51:02Because Catholicism is very much about the materiality of worship. You have relics, you have crucifixes, you have saint statues, you have... Even the cathedrals are involved in the materiality of worship, and Protestantism was like, "No, we're not doing it anymore."

51:22And everything was solo scriptura, but at the same time, if you think about the cat-taff, you know, silver amulets as a magical object because they were inscribed with the divine name. What's a Bible?

51:38If not a piece of material media filled with the divine name, and frequently you'll have people using the Bible as an icon, as a divine image, as something that is thought to bring the spirit or something like that.

51:58And people treat it with respect. You don't drop your Bible. Latter-day Saints might have been familiar with... There was a very asinine, very sexist thing that went on in missions a long time ago where they would say, "Every time you drop your scriptures, your future wife gains five pounds."

52:19Which was awful. What you made me think of was, and this is what I thought you were going to say, because Latter-day Saints who have gone downtown in Salt Lake City during their general conference, there are always jerks who are protesting.

52:40Usually they're some brand of evangelical or whatever, and they're there to tell the Mormons that they're the wrong kind of Christians and that they're going to go to hell or whatever.

52:51And I remember one guy who was really trying to be in everybody's face, and he would take the Book of Mormon and he would throw it on the ground and drag it around by a string or whatever, and then he would say, "And I dare you to take my Bible and throw it on the ground.

53:09I'll beat the crap out of you, and blah, blah, blah." I was like, "Okay, I guess your Bible." Yeah, like you say, it's more than a book to that man.

53:18To that man, the pages, it wasn't just ink on paper. It was something more than that.

53:26It was endowed with something that you couldn't see, but you knew it was there, which is literally the exact same intuitive feature of what is responsible for the Cataphanom silver scrolls for all these magical amulets, for everything that went on

53:46recently as a way to materially manifest God's presence. And so I write about that, and that's kind of the conclusion to my book, looking at ancient and medieval and even modern Jewish and Christian practices where the text of the Bible is treated as a divine image.

54:04And so when people talk about how Christians worship the Bible, it's like, "Yeah, I get that as a critique, but it's very much real, and it's something that is just a natural intuitive outcome of thinking of the Bible as containing

54:22you know, because it contains God's name a bunch of times and things like that, that there's something it is endowed with, something a material that can help you." And so, and I would even venture to say that there's a sense in which that has a small influence on the notion that we need to have a Bible in every classroom,

54:42because that makes a lot of sense to me. We can't have a crucifix in every classroom, but if we've got a Bible in every classroom, guess what? We've got the divine name in every classroom.

54:51It's sitting there. Yeah, and so it's given off that "wah, wah, wah, wah" kind of whatever. As long as you've got the wah-wahs, then, you know, your God is there.

55:02To be clear, that doesn't make it okay. Right, right, right, right. Not constitutional, but not appropriate.

55:10Yeah. All right, well, I think this is fascinating. I think this was a fun conversation.

55:16In short, to conclude Bible, magical object. Yeah, yeah, good. Okay, everybody get out there and enjoy your magic.

55:26Have fun with it. I mean, it's clearly a psychological human thing. I mean, we've talked about, you know,

55:33we've talked about how our psychology is sort of riddled with magical thinking and agency detection has led to a whole bunch of things.

55:42Anyway, it's very human. It's very human to have these, to imbue objects with magic. So get out there and enjoy your magic, people.

55:51Yeah, and don't give other people a hard time because they enjoy their magic a different way than you.

55:56Right, but also don't inflict your magic on anybody else. Don't act like anybody's not cool because they don't do your magic.

56:04Anywho, imprecatory magic, not a good thing. Not a good thing. Don't do it. All right.

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