Ep 1: In The Beginning*

00:00They hear God, tromping around in the garden, and they hide from him, and they kind of sheepishly go, "Um, we're not here. Come back another time."

00:12Dave's not here, man.

00:14Hey, everybody.

00:19Hi, friends, and welcome to the Data Over Dogma podcast.

00:23Well, we bring you the latest in biblical scholarship.

00:26And do our best to combat the spread of misinformation.

00:29With me is Dr. Dan McClellan, biblical scholar and TikTok star, hi Dan.

00:34And I'm non-scholar and TikTok nobody, Dan Beacher.

00:38Well, Dan, here we are.

00:40Here we are.

00:41It is our first episode.

00:44Congratulations.

00:45And congratulations to you and congratulations to all of the listeners and viewers watching us on YouTube and wherever.

00:53We're very happy for you.

00:56Yes, indeed.

00:57So coming up on the show today, we're going to discuss Genesis.

01:02We're going to dive right into the very front end of the Bible.

01:05And Dan, you're going to introduce us to the holy name, to the deity, the name of the God of the Bible.

01:13Is that right?

01:14Yeah, our second segment, we're going to talk about, well, we're going to call it, "What does that mean?"

01:18And we're going to talk about different principles, different ideas within biblical scholarship that are in circulation right now.

01:26So I'm going to talk about the divine name.

01:28Let's start, though, with our segment chapter in verse, we're going to dive into the very first part of the very first book of the Bible, which is Genesis.

01:40And the way we're working this, I decided that I would dive in, I would read the first, I think we're going to do the first three chapters of Genesis.

01:51And I'm going to bring my confusions, my things that I don't understand to you, Dan, and you're going to sort of help us understand what we're looking at here.

02:01All right, let's give it a chance.

02:02And the first thing we should do is sort of situate this within the Bible.

02:10What do we have here?

02:11We've got a story, well, possibly multiple stories of the creation.

02:18Where does this come from?

02:20So most scholars would agree that we've got two different creation stories in the first three chapters of Genesis, one that's running from Genesis 1-1 up through the first half of Genesis 2-4.

02:31The second one runs from the second half of Genesis 2-4 through to the end of chapter 3.

02:37And that second one, most scholars would say, is probably the earlier one.

02:41And this is a story with a very anthropomorphic deity that makes noise as they walk through the garden of Eden.

02:50This is a deity that creates manually by manipulating the soil.

02:55This is a deity that interacts directly with their creation.

03:00And this is also a deity who seems to be trying to kind of recalibrate or fix their creation as they go on.

03:09And what many scholars believe is centuries later, the priestly authors.

03:15So these would have been cultic authorities, people who had authority over the temple or worship, who would have been associated with the state, with the king, with important leaders within Israel.

03:28They came through and kind of updated things and said, "You know what? We need a cleaner account. We're going to make some corrections here."

03:37And this was probably written when Israel was in exile.

03:42And so in the absence of the temple, and we see an account that envisions a more transcendent deity.

03:50They create by divine fiat, by speaking things into existence. And the account is kind of interacting with creation accounts that are known from the region of Babylon.

04:01And they're kind of combating, responding to those creation accounts from Babylon, while also updating what's going on in the earlier creation accounts.

04:11So whereas the deity from Genesis 2 creates with their hands, the deity from Genesis 1 does not, whereas the deity from Genesis 2 has to kind of update their creation.

04:23They create the human, then they go, "Hmm, needs something else. So we're going to create some animals."

04:28No, that's not quite right. It needs something else. And then we create the woman.

04:34Genesis 1, "Everything is created and God saw that it was good." So it's all right. It's all correct right from the beginning.

04:42And we also have the account divided into multiple days of creation, rather than just one single creative period.

04:50We've got six days and then a day of rest, which many scholars would suggest. One is borrowing from the sevenfold division of days that was common in Mesopotamia around that time period.

05:06But two may be an attempt to kind of demarcate some sacred time in the absence of a temple, which is a demarcation of sacred space. So a way to kind of set apart this time and say, "We don't have a temple in which we can worship, but let's separate off a day and let's use that for worship."

05:26So it is responding to some of the circumstances that the people for whom these authors are writing are facing in exile. That's probably what most scholars would say about this.

05:40So the first creation account, probably 8th, 7th century BCE, somewhere around there. Genesis 1, the later creation account, probably 6th, maybe even 5th century BCE.

05:58That's the actual creation of the earth. It seems unlikely. Okay. Let's start in the beginning with the phrase in the beginning, because I know that you have an issue with that.

06:11So that's a traditional translation of Genesis 1, 1 in the Hebrew. In my King James, that's how it says. That's what it says. And that's what most conservative Christian and even some conservative Jewish translations will render. The Hebrew there begins with this word, but a sheet, which occurs about 4, 5, or 6 other times in the Hebrew Bible, and it never means in the beginning.

06:34It always means in the beginning of something. Usually it's referring to the beginning of the reign of some king. But in Hebrew, it seems to be in what's called the construct state.

06:48And this is how Hebrew creates what is called a genitive relationship, X of Y. So we have that helper word of an English to indicate that. And in Hebrew, you put two words together, and then you pulled the accent off of the first word and moved it to the second.

07:06And so that could sometimes change the way you pronounce the first word. And that was just the indication that this is an X of Y relationship.

07:15Okay. So the opening word there seems to be saying in the beginning of God creating the heavens and the earth, which is what we would call a temporal clause. It's explaining the time period in which something happened or in which certain circumstances

07:32obtained. And so more colloquially in English, and the way you will find in many more scholarly modern translations of Genesis one one, it says, when God began to create the heavens and the earth.

07:47And then verses two and three are describing the circumstances that obtained when God began to create the heavens and the earth. So when God began this creation, the earth was empty and desolate.

08:01And the spirit of God or this divine spirit moved over the depths or over the waters.

08:09Yeah, that's an interesting point, because as I read it, I was, I was already confused because, A, we already have an earth. Earth already exists in this, but it is chaotic in whatever way that whatever that means.

08:25And there's water, because God is moving over the face of the water or upon the face of the waters. So far, the creation, there's already stuff there. Like, that's, that's what we can, what we can know.

08:40So yes, it can't be the very, very beginning of all creation, because boom, we're starting with some stuff. And that's day one day one, God does a thing which I don't understand, which is he separates light from dark. Okay, he hasn't even invented the sun or the moon yet, but that's fine.

08:58But we move on to day two, God separates the waters above from the waters below in a firmament. Now, how do you describe a firmament? So the word there in Hebrew is rakiah, which comes from a verb that means to hammer out.

09:16And so the idea is kind of an enormous solid dome, like a crystalline dome that was created in order to suspend or hold up the waters of the heavens and separate them from the waters of the earth to allow later the dry land to appear.

09:36But this fits with a number of other cosmogonies or creation accounts from the nations around Israel in ancient Southwest Asia that viewed creation as fundamentally coming from water, the waters of chaos, chaotic waters, that is the origin of creation, according to a lot of these accounts.

09:58Now, in the Babylonian account, upon which Genesis one is likely to some degree based and to which it is responding, these chaotic waters are actually a chaos deity known as Tiamat.

10:15And they engage in battle with this deity, Marduk, and after after Tiamat's defeat, Marduk splits Tiamat's corpse in half, and the waters beneath are one half of this corpse and then the other half is suspended above for the waters above.

10:35Yeah, that's fascinating, but it's clear that the idea of the sky is that, and I mean it makes sense, it's blue or whatever, but the idea of the sky is that there is something holding out a whole bunch of water.

10:51And I guess maybe that's what comes when it rains, it somehow seeps through or whatever, that's interesting, that's fascinating.

10:58That's when we get to the flood account, the windows of heaven open and that allows, and that allows all of that above water.

11:06Okay, okay, there we go, then some things are starting to fall into place, I like that.

11:11Okay, so then we get to day three, the waters under the heaven are gathered into one place, which is a little confusing because the waters are spread out all over the place.

11:22It's in the very beginning, gathered into one place, and dry land appears, so we have earth and seas, and grass, herbs, fruit trees start to appear.

11:33So we've got plants and dry land.

11:37And dump in here, if there's anything interesting that I'm that I'm gliding over because I don't know.

11:42Well, one interesting thing I could comment on here is our first three days of creation, what's going on is things are being separated.

11:51And that process of separation is creating the environment.

11:56And then the next three days of creation are going to fill those environments with the entities that inhabit them now.

12:04So day one was the separation of light and dark, and you're going to see in the corresponding day for the creation of the inhabitants of the light in the dark, the sun, the stars, the planets.

12:15Day two is the separation of the waters above from the waters beneath and the corresponding day five is going to see the creation of the fish and the seas and the birds of the skies.

12:26Day three, by the way, the words, the birds seem to be coming from the water. I thought that that was fascinating that it seemed like the water animals are created in day five.

12:35And those happen to include the foul. Well, they fly around through the skies.

12:40Well, that's right. The skies are water. Right. Okay.

12:43And then day three corresponds to day six, where we have the inhabitants of the dry lands and everything else is filled in.

12:53So there's a symmetry to this presentation of the creation account, which I think is is a good reason to think this was intended to be symbolic.

13:03This was intended to reflect kind of the order and the symmetry of creation. Everything is good. It corresponds. It is symmetrical.

13:13It's got a poetry to it. Exactly. And I think that, yeah, I think that that poetic sense, it would make sense that this was symbolism, that this wasn't meant to be literal stuff.

13:25Now there's a really interesting thing towards the end of Genesis one, which is that the book says has God saying, let us make man in our image after our likeness. Yes. Now, are we talking about the royal we hear or what is this us that's happening?

13:44So this is what's called a cohortative verb in Hebrew. It's a first person plural command. And most scholars would suggest that this is a vestigial reference to the divine council.

13:56That creation is something that is overseen is supervised by this deliberative body of deities and they make the plans for it. They see that everything is executed correctly.

14:07Now the creation itself is executed by God, the God of Israel, Elohim in this passage. But they seem to be doing so in deliberation with the rest of this divine council.

14:20So let us make man is plans being made by the divine council, and then it is the singular Elohim who actually creates man and woman after their own likeness, their own image.

14:36Right. All right. And then day seven, everybody's tired, so we all take a nap. So that's Genesis one, basically in a nutshell, although as you point out Genesis to the first.

14:49Fourish versus feel like they're actually belonging back to Genesis one. Yeah, we have kind of a repetition of what's going on in the day that God created and this time rather than the heavens and the earth beginning from this kind of transcendent, you know, million foot view.

15:07God creates the earth and the heavens, and so the order is reversed. So this is an earlier kind of more earthly based conceptualization of creation, where the perspective the scope is a little more limited and then it expands out.

15:24But this, this is the exact same way of beginning the account that we see in Genesis one, where we give a temporal clause in the day of the creation of earth and heavens and then explain the circumstances that obtained at that time period.

15:39So I would suggest that Genesis one is patterned after organizationally, the beginning of the creation account in Genesis two, only whereas Genesis two says in the day that God created the earth and the heavens, Genesis one's got six days of creation.

15:55So they were probably like, we can't, we can't say day. What are we going to say? Let's just say in the beginning of, and so I went with in the beginning of the creation of, or God's creating heavens, the heavens and the earth.

16:08So it's kind of a formulaic way of doing the same thing that Genesis one is doing.

16:14Yeah, after verse four, once we've started the Genesis two account of the creation. So as you say, in the day when God made the earth and the heavens, the earth is barren because God has never caused it to rain.

16:29Interesting. A different relationship between with water in this one seems like earth and heavens. There's no mention of water being above the heavens or the heavens being having any relationship to water.

16:43And then King James has a missed a rising, and a NRSV has a stream rising up from the earth. Anyway, waters come, but it comes from the earth in both, in both of those, you know, I'm not going to look.

17:00It's your job to know all of the translation. It does seem like the water doesn't come from the heavens at first. It comes from the earth. Is that correct?

17:08Yeah, so this is probably a reference to this idea of subterranean waters. The idea that the earth is kind of floating above waters. And so this, the deity here is extracting the waters from the subterranean realms in order to kind of fertilize the earth and allow

17:27everything to sprout and to grow. So there's, there's a sense in which it's appealing to this idea of deity as, as well, to the divine profile of the storm deity, the deity who has sovereignty over the thunder, the lightning, the rain, but also subterranean

17:44and they're associated with fertility. They help things grow. And so this creation account is associated, according to more traditional source criticism with what's called the yawest source. And that is a source that likes the divine name, the tetragrammaton, which we're going to get into more detail in another segment.

18:03But that divine profile of Adonai, the tetragrammaton is very closely associated with the concept of the storm deity, the deity who controls the waters. And in that way, provides fertility to the earth.

18:19Interesting. Okay. Then now we finally get to humans and God gathers up some dust. He's the divine sculptor. He fashions a dude.

18:32And blows, breathes the breath of life into his dust man. Yeah. Now this is, this is very interesting because this is sounding an awful lot like the creation of a divine image, which frequently they were made with clay.

18:49And that's what combining dust and water is going to get you, is going to get you clay. And there was a ritual. So we have variations on this ritual whereby the divine image is enlivened.

19:01And usually it has to do with allowing breath through the mouth. But here we've got the breath through the nostrils. And this is parallel to what we saw in Genesis 1 26 and 27, where man is created in the image of in the likeness of.

19:20And scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that this is talking about humanity as in some sense, a divine image. And so the Genesis 2 account is kind of more explicitly framing the creation of humanity as the creation of a divine image with the breathing the breath of life,

19:40which is kind of communicating divine agency, divine power life into this creation made of clay. And so there are a lot of resonances with the idea of the creation of divine images.

19:56I would argue that this probably has to do with trying to disincentivize the use of divine images by saying, don't go worship those gods of wood and stone. Humanity is the divine image. So interesting. So worship, we should worship ourselves.

20:13That's what you're saying. Or at least don't go worship things made of wood and stone. And this pops up in some later Jewish literature, for instance, the idea of the fall of Satan. One of the stories of the life of Adam and Eve, and particularly the Latin version of it talks about how Satan was able to get the angels on his side or at least a subset of them by saying, hey, why do you keep worshiping Adam?

20:40Because he's the divine image. Well, you shouldn't be worshiping Adam. You should be worshiping God because humanity was created a little lower than the angels according to the Greek translation of one of the Psalms.

20:54And so this idea of humanity as the image of God in the sense of a divine image and idol is something that we find popping up here and there in ancient Judaism.

21:04Well, that's very interesting. But we know that this dust man has not achieved all of the things of God because we're going to get to that later. We take another step in a little bit.

21:18But as we move on through the plan, God creates a garden called Eden, puts the man in there, makes the trees grow with fruit, including two trees that are called out, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

21:36Are those new to this story? Are they unique to this story? Do they come to those trees come up in imagery in other places? Do we know?

21:47So the idea of a tree of life is something that is closely associated with worship and temples in other societies. Trees were symbols of life because a tree needed water to grow.

22:01And, you know, when they're when their foliage is out, they are indications that there are resources to sustained life somewhere nearby. And so frequently trees were associated with worship.

22:16And you have in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, images of people sustaining themselves off of trees, and you even have an interesting illustration in some Egyptian texts of trees covered in breasts, and they basically breastfeed to sustain life and growth and things like that.

22:37So the idea of a tree of life is something that is pretty widespread and can be found in a number of different societies.

22:44The idea of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is a little distinct, but the pursuit of knowledge is something that all societies center can serve important.

22:59And so it's not totally coming out of left field, but the symbols that are used are a little distinctive in the idea of the Garden of Eden.

23:07And additionally, the idea of a garden as like a temple as a royal place for leisure and things like that where a king or a human may be assigned to work as a gardener.

23:20That's also something that resonates with other traditions from Egypt, from Mesopotamia and from elsewhere. So we're still pulling from kind of the broader sociocultural matrix. We're still doing things that other societies around Israel does, but we're just kind of customizing it.

23:40We're just kind of making it our own in this story. Yeah. And as you point out, this man who does not receive a name yet is to tend to this garden.

23:52He can eat from every tree except the good and evil tree.

23:57And God is very clear that on that, if he eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he will die on that day, that day he will die.

24:08Yeah, and that's a pretty odd kind of specification on the very day. Yeah, you eat of it, you will die.

24:16Especially odd considering, and I'm assuming pretty much everyone who's listening to this knows that he ends up eating the fruit. What does that end up dying?

24:27At least not yet. There have been a number of ways that people have tried to renegotiate what's going on here because it sounds an awful lot like the thing that God said didn't really happen.

24:41Whereas the thing that the serpent said in chapter three, serpent says two things and we'll get to that in a moment.

24:48But there's a pretty good case to make that both of the things the serpent said were true over and against the thing that God said not being true.

24:57Now, it's a little squishy. It's a little fuzzy, but it does raise some interesting questions on what the authors are trying to do with the text.

25:05Yeah, I'm just going to push through the rest of this creation. I'll brush past the fact that the river that flows out of Eden goes to Fort.

25:16I assume that it's just sort of trying to come up with an origin story for these different geographical areas and different known rivers.

25:25So the man has lonely. God decides that the best way that the man needs a help meat or a helper makes a bunch of animals.

25:38Yeah, so interestingly, the word here that we translate help meat that comes from the King James version, it's two words in Hebrew and it's a helper that corresponds to.

25:49And so, and the helper there does not necessarily mean somebody subordinate to the same word is used to as a reference to God in multiple different places.

26:00And so it's someone who's helping out. And here, this helper is someone who corresponds to the man.

26:09And the first set of helpers that are attempted are critters. We just put a bunch of critters down there.

26:19The man has to name them all apparently. That doesn't work out. He's still bored. So God creates this other helper. No, is it the same word is this helper/help meat word, the same word in reference to the animals as it is in reference to the woman?

26:37Yeah, I think the idea is that the animals were a failed attempt to achieve this helper who corresponds to.

26:45And there are some folks who argue that this was about sexual compatibility.

26:50And so I don't know that that makes a lot of sense here that the animals were being created to see which one Adam fancied, but that is something that some people have argued.

27:03Yeah, the idea is, oh, that didn't work. Okay, we're going to try again to achieve this corresponding helper.

27:11Right. But God doesn't use dust again. He yolks a rib out of the man. He calls in the divine anesthesiologist and makes him go to sleep.

27:22And then takes a rib, makes woman, the man is happy, satisfied. This is, this at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh.

27:35This one shall be called woman. We're out of man. This one was taken. I don't think I'm assuming that there's a reference to that there's a Hebrew thing that I don't understand about why woman is a relate is related to out of man.

27:51Well, the Hebrew word for man is ish and then for woman is isha. And it seems like they may not actually be etymologically related.

28:03Oh, interesting. So in a sense, it's probably a bit of a folk etymology for why the two words are related.

28:11Interesting. And then we close off with the fact that they're naked and totally okay with that. Yep.

28:21So, okay, great. Thanks for, thanks for that little inclusion there. And then we move on to Genesis three. And this may be, you know, I'm pushing on my time here, but this is fascinating stuff.

28:37We start out with the serpent. And, you know, I was always taught in Sunday school that this was, this was the devil, but it doesn't seem to be when I, I mean, it seems to just be one of the wild critters in the garden.

28:56The association of the serpent with Satan with the devil is something that we don't see until maybe the first century BCE, but more clearly the first century CE.

29:07Oh, wow. Prior to that, this is just a snake that's just slithering around. And the snake is a symbol that is associated with healing with life.

29:17And even with immortality in other stories, the famous story is Gilgamesh, who goes and he's got to capture this flower in order to achieve mortality.

29:26And at the last second, he's under water getting, trying to get it in a snake, snatches it from him. And there are other associations as well.

29:35And even today, medical associations, the snake wrapped around the staff is a symbol of healing. And we find that in a number of other societies.

29:46And so, and we even see it in the book of numbers with the symbol Nahushtan, which was the bronze serpent that Moses created in order to facilitate healing of everybody who was bitten by serpent. So the, the symbolism of this serpent with the association of the serpent with the evil is something that develops much later here.

30:08It is a symbol of perhaps craftiness, shrewdness, cleverness, something like that. So definitely not any Satan figure, which had not even developed yet.

30:20And I'm going to call a point of order on you. You said that this was just a snake slithering around, but I don't think it was slithering around yet.

30:28You may have had legs. We don't know. Yeah, there are illustrations of snakes with legs in some Egyptian texts. Oh, interesting. And one of the, one of the, the curse on the serpent is that it will crawl around on his belly.

30:41That's right. So we haven't gotten to a slithery snake yet. You got me. The snake says, did God say you shall not eat from any tree in the garden? And the woman, he's talking to the woman now. She doesn't have a name yet.

30:54The woman said, we, we may eat of the fruit. I'm, what, what, I'm in the new revised standard version, updated edition. I think we have to call out our auditions when we're reading.

31:08So, so she says, we, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it or you shall die.

31:18And then the serpent's like, no, that doesn't sound right. In point of fact, you won't die. God knows that if you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

31:34That's an interesting thing. Frankly, of all the things that I associate with godly, godly powers, knowing what's good and bad doesn't seem high on my list, but it seems high on their list.

31:48Well, yeah, and this is, this is something I talk about in my book, I don't know his divine images. We're talking about here, we have two of the prototypical features of deity. One is having all knowledge. And within the cognitive science of religion, we refer to what's called strategic knowledge.

32:06If you can access knowledge that helps you make any kind of decision, you could possibly have to make in any given circumstance. That's pretty powerful stuff. That's what the gods have access to, which is why prophets exist.

32:18We need to go to the gods to help us make decisions because they have full access to strategic information. And so knowledge of good and evil, it could be this idea of morality, knowing what's good and what's bad, but it could also be a marism, which is a fancy word for

32:35naming the two ends of a spectrum as a way to include the whole spectrum. So it's the good, it's the evil, and it's everything in between.

32:45Okay. And so that would cover all knowledge. It's kind of like saying, you know, the book, what they teach you at Harvard Business School and the other book, what they don't teach you at Harvard Business School, is the sum of all human knowledge.

32:57And so it's a way to say you're going to get one step closer to deity by having all knowledge. And then the other prototypical feature of deity would be immortality, an entity that has immortality and all knowledge. That's a god.

33:12And so, but it's interesting that the serpent presents God as kind of trying to hinder humanity. Humanity is in pursuit of more knowledge, longer life immortality and God's like, no, no, keep them away from there. We don't want that.

33:28Yeah, interesting. And also, we know that there's this other tree lurking somewhere around that would get them the rest of the way to Godhood.

33:37What hasn't been mentioned yet? Well, we're good. Yeah, we're getting that. I mean, it was mentioned briefly in, in, in chapter two, right? I think it was.

33:48Does it talk about two trees? I thought it talked about.

33:51I think it talks about the tree of life and the tree anyway. So eventually, Eve decides, okay, this serpent seems on the level, and I'm going to eat the fruit, eats the fruit, doesn't die, gives some to her husband.

34:06Who also doesn't die, but they suddenly know that they're naked, which means that the knowledge has happened somehow that nudity is inherently bad, and they've figured that out.

34:21Yeah, and this is, this is the, the loss of innocence. And I, and I think it's interesting to note here, there are many translations that omit something from the Hebrew here because it says that she ate the fruit and then she gave some of the fruit to her husband and the Hebrew has preposition

34:42who was with her, meaning Adam was there the whole time. Now, historically, there have been some translations that have just quietly omitted that who was with her phrase in order to kind of absolve Adam of responsibility

34:59for allowing Eve or just standing by and not doing anything while Eve did what's, they both knew they were not supposed to do. So there's some, there's some oddities in the way this has been translated.

35:12And also the, the way Eve repeats the prohibition to the serpent is distinct from the way it was told to Adam, and we never had, we never hear about God telling Eve about the story. So people wonder, did Adam tell her? Did God, she have some separate discussion

35:30with God? Why is the story different from what Adam was told? Because Adam wasn't told you can't even touch it. That's something that only Eve brings up. So there are some aspects of the story that suggest maybe we're not getting the whole story. Maybe we've got a whittled down

35:45reader's digest version of this story, or maybe this was just a way to tell it. And, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of stuff that was just in the, in the air, you just had to know the background in order to make sense of the story.

36:01Yeah, indeed. All right. Well, then they, they make fig leaf clothing. God starts poking around. They hear God, tromping around in the garden, and they hide from him. And he calls out to them and, and they kind of sheepishly go, we're not here.

36:22Come back another time to which God said, your man. To which God says, where have you been eating the fruit? Did you eat the fruit? Yeah. Adam literally says, we're hiding because we're naked. Right. And God says, who told you you were naked? Well, how did you fight? How did you figure that out? Did you eat that fruit? Yeah, we ate the fruit.

36:50The serpent tricked us. And I think there's some interesting details here that kind of rub against a lot of contemporary thinking about deity. The notion that deity is omniscient is kind of challenged by God going, where are you?

37:07What are you doing? Hey, whoa, whoa. Did you do what I told you not to do? And, you know, this can be rationalized as, oh, God's just kind of leading them on once them to tell the truth like we do with our kids.

37:19Are you the one who wrote on the wall kind of stuff? Right, right, right. But without the assumption that God has to know all things, it kind of presents a deity who does not have all knowledge and is really finding these things out.

37:34And I think verse 22 is an indication of that we have, and verse five, the serpent says, you know, you will not die, but you will be like, and I think your translation says like God, knowing good and evil could just as easily be translated like the gods.

37:48Knowing good and evil, because that word for knowing there is a participle that's plural.

37:53Oh, interesting. In verse 22, God then turns to somebody and says, the man has become like one of us. So we've got another one of those plural references.

38:05And so becoming like one of us suggests that the serpent statement, you will be like the gods was perfectly accurate. This wasn't a lie.

38:14This came true. And God is kind of surprised by this and says, Oh crap, we need to lock that door or else there.

38:22And I looked it up. Yeah, it does mention the tree of life earlier. So he's got to go shut that down because if they take from the tree of life, they have become gods.

38:34And for some reason, in this story, that's the last thing God wants.

38:39Yeah, that's that's no good. No, that's no good. So everybody gets punished. Everybody was naughty. So we take away the serpent's legs and he's got a slither on the ground.

38:50Woman has to have painful childbirth. And everybody's kicked out of the garden.

38:57So, and then the garden is guarded by a dude with a flaming sword, a cherubim. What's a cherubim? So, head of beam is a word that is plural.

39:10And basically refers to kind of guardian hybrid animals. We, this is what's depicted in some ancient Egyptian and some ancient Mesopotamian iconography and even some sculptures.

39:25Basically, it was, it was like a lion with wings and kind of a human like face. And so we, we see these things depicted in a bunch of different places and sometimes they guard the entrance to sacred spaces like temples.

39:40And other times they sit on either side of the throne. They are kind of like the armrest for a throne. And we see both of these things in the Hebrew Bible where they guard the entrance to go to the garden of Eden.

39:53And then they are also on either side of the Ark of the Covenant, which is represented as a divine throne elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.

40:03Right. Well, so if you see a lion with wings and a face of a person and they have a flaming sword, try to sneak past because that's where the tree of life is. And if you eat from that, you'll be able to live forever.

40:18Now, now you're making me think of the never-ending story and trying to get past the oracles. That's right. That's right. All right. Well, I think that's a good start. We're in it. We're, we're, we've, we've waited into one of the forks of the river and, and, and we're started.

40:36So thanks, Dan. Let's move on to our next segment.

40:42Hey, everybody. Welcome to our segment. What does that mean? And yeah, this is a segment where we're going to try and lay some groundwork for the future of this podcast by describing some of the academic consensus, some of the background.

40:58Some of the stuff that we're going to refer back to regularly as we talk about the Hebrew Bible and the academic study of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and religion in general.

41:11And so today I want to talk about the divine name Adonai. Now, as a bit of a, an introduction to how I talk about this, I'm not going to pronounce the name as it has the pronunciation has been reconstructed by scholars in entirely academic settings.

41:28I will use that pronunciation that is spelled Y A H W E H, but as an accommodation to those of our listeners or viewers who are sensitive to the pronunciation of that name, I have offered to in my social media, not pronounce that.

41:44So I'm going to say Adonai. And when you hear Adonai, that's the Hebrew word for Lord. That is a substitution for the divine name. I will occasionally refer to it as the tetragrammaton, which means the four letters, Yodhay, vavhay, which is presented as the personal name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible.

42:04Now, and it's only four letters just to be just to clarify. It's only four letters because Hebrew doesn't include vowel letters. Is that correct?

42:12In the writing vowels were not historically included. And if you go to Israel today, the newspapers and the signs and everything don't have any vowels on them.

42:21But in the Hebrew Bible, in an effort to try to be more precise about how things were pronounced and what things meant, there were a number of scribes who created a system of vowels, dots and dashes and things that went below within or above certain letters.

42:39So if you go look at a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, you'll see the vowels in there. But yes, Yodhay, vavhay is the consonants of the divine name and the vowels were not written.

42:50And it were not exactly sure precisely how it was pronounced, but scholars have a good idea how it was probably reconstructed. And we'll talk a little bit about that in just a second.

43:01But where does the divine name come from? What does it mean? And what are the origins of the deity who possesses that name?

43:11The earliest references we have to a deity that goes by that name, the Tetragrammaton Adonai, come from the second half of the 9th century BCE. So about 850 BCE, probably down to a few years before 800 BCE. And those three inscriptions are the Misha inscription.

43:31The Taldan inscription and the black obelisk of Shamanis are the third. And these are actually not from Israelite authors. The Misha inscription was written by King Misha, a Moabite. The Taldan inscription was written by an Aramayan ruler, and the black obelisk of Shamanis are the third is a product of an Assyrian ruler.

43:59And the Misha inscription refers directly to the God of Israel as Adonai in talking about one of their battles between Moab and Israel that may correspond in some way to some of the battles that are discussed in the early chapters of the Book of 2 Kings.

44:20And they talk about, or Misha boasts about carting off the vessels of Adonai and dragging them before his deity, his patron deity in Moab.

44:35And then we have discussion of some of the kings of Israel and specifically of the Amride dynasty. So that's one of the earliest references. We don't have a direct reference to the deity themselves in the other two inscriptions,

44:52but what we do have are references to Israelite or Judahite kings who have names that have Yauistic theophoric elements. So theophoric elements just means a part of your name that refers to a deity by name or with some noun that means God or something like that.

45:11So Dan, you and I assume your full name is Daniel. It is just like me. And that is Don Yell in Hebrew. It means God is my judge. And the last two letters ELL are the Hebrew word for God. So that would be the theophoric element.

45:28And so the kings that are referred to in the Black Obelisk of Shelmanes are the third in the Tel Dan inscription have Yauistic theophoric elements. And if the ruler of the nation consistently has this deity's name in their name, it's an indication that deity was probably pretty important within that nation.

45:47So Adonai was probably the patron deity of the nation of Israel by the time of these inscriptions around the middle to the end of the 9th century BCE. Now, this is actually a few centuries after our earliest reference to a people known as Israel.

46:05We have from around the year 1208 BCE an inscription from Egypt that was commissioned by a king named Marneptah that refers to Israel and it carries a what's called a determinative, which is kind of like a category sign that refers to this Israel as a people.

46:28Not a nation, not a city state, not a city, but a people, which indicates that they probably weren't an established nation by this time period, but there was some kind of band or coalition or federation of people known as Israel.

46:47And that was Judea the front, the people's front of Judea. The people's Judea in front. Right. We're not splitters over here. And this name Israel probably means something like L contends or may L contend and that word L is not only the generic Northwest Semitic word for God, but it's also the proper name of one of the gods of the Northwest Semitic pantheon.

47:12This is the well-known patriarchal high deity. And so Israel seems to be dedicated to a patron deity L who is a pretty widespread leading deity of this whole region.

47:28It's not evidently Adonai.

47:31Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's right there in the name. Israel, that's interesting. Yeah. And there are ways to, if you want to try to renegotiate that, there are ways to get around that and suggest all that's the deity was known by both names.

47:48Right. But somewhere between 1208 BCE ish and around 850 to 800 BCE, it seems like a deity named Adonai arrived on the scene and exceeded to rule over the Israelite pantheon.

48:04The name L is known from a bunch of different societies in this region in this time period. The name Adonai is not known from any pantheon at all. That deity is totally unknown to the rest of the world of ancient Southwest Asia.

48:17And even the biblical data show periods where the divine name Adonai seems to be unknown to the people of Israel, or at least they didn't refer to Adonai as the head of the pantheon.

48:29And an interesting kind of gesture in this direction is Exodus 6.3, where Moses is being introduced again to the God of Israel, and they tell them in Exodus 6.3.

48:48All should die, which is an L divine epithet. But by my name Adonai, I was not known to them. And specifically lists Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

49:01But you can go back and look in the book of Genesis and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob all very clearly know the name Adonai. In fact, I call out that name multiple times.

49:15And so it seems like whoever's responsible for writing Exodus 6.3 either has versions of these patriarchal narratives where the divine name doesn't occur, or wasn't really an adherence to Adonai.

49:30And so didn't really like the idea of Adonai as the patron deity and preferred L should die. And the author of Exodus 6.3 is kind of merging the two in order to adopt all these stories, but kind of sew them together.

49:48So it's a unified narrative. And one of the indications that maybe that's accurate, that their patriarchal narratives did not originally have references to the divine name, is there's not a single figure in all the book of Genesis that has a Yahwistic theophoric element in their name.

50:08As soon as we get to the book of Exodus and for the rest of the Hebrew Bible, there are Yahwistic theophoric elements in names all over the place. There's not a single one anywhere in the book of Genesis.

50:20And so all the presence of the tetrogramaton, the divine name in Genesis is probably a secondary addition to the literature. It's probably occurred very, very early on, but it seems like it was added secondarily.

50:36Interesting. So you're saying, so originally, probably when Genesis was written, it didn't have those elements and then someone just decided to throw them in because it spices it up. It makes it make sense or something like that.

50:50Well, originally, the stories from Genesis probably circulated as separate stories. You probably had traditions regarding Jacob, traditions regarding Isaac, traditions regarding Joseph, traditions regarding Abraham.

51:02And in their original forms, they probably didn't reference Adonai, but as they were being brought together and stitched together and woven into a single story, a single text, whoever was doing that weaving.

51:15Yes, may have said we're going to bring Adonai in here because that's our patron deity now. And so we're going to overlay this divine name on these earlier stories and just rationalize it as a deity who goes by multiple different names.

51:31And we do have an indication that when Adonai was originally incorporated into the Israelite pantheon, they were incorporated as a second-tier deity as one of the children of the high deity L.

51:45And that's Deuteronomy 32, 8, and 9, which in most traditional translations of the Bible, it says that the most high divided up the nations according to the number of the children of Israel is what many translations say.

51:59But we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that originally it said children of God, Benelohim.

52:09And so it seems that this most high El-Yon, a title that is applied primarily to El within the Hebrew Bible, that that deity seems to have allocated the nations to their children.

52:24And it says in verse 9, an Adonai's portion was Jacob, Israel was the lot of his inheritance, which would seem to group Adonai with the Benelohim, the children of God, and that El-Yon was Adonai's father.

52:44Now this is interesting, and that makes sense as a sort of, when you look at various pantheons, Greek or the sort of mythos, there's frequently a father or a parent God who then sort of divvies out power to the children of God.

53:07Yeah, and we have in the Eucharitic literature, so Ugarit was a city that was destroyed around 1200 BCE, it was located in Syria, but we've discovered almost a thousand texts written in their language which was closely related to Hebrew.

53:20And they have El as this patriarchal high deity, and they have the 70 children of El and Athirat or Ashara. And then one of them, one of the main figures among the children of El is a storm deity named Baal.

53:37And this may have been the divine profile that Adonai adopted when they were brought into the northern hill country and inserted into the Israelite pantheon.

53:50A lot of the imagery that is associated with the divine name Adonai is very closely related to storm deity imagery, this idea that this is the deity who's in charge of thunder and lightning and rain, and we mentioned this in connection with the creation account when we talked about Genesis 1 through 3.

54:09But Adonai seems to be this youthful warrior who is associated with violent weather with low hanging, thick thunderous clouds with flashes of lightning.

54:23But there was already a storm deity on the scene, and that was Baal, and we seem to have a lot of conflict in the Hebrew Bible between Adonai and Baal.

54:31Because when you get further into the book, you see Baal as this demonized character, as someone who watches, I see a lot of videos of modern day pastors screaming about how Baal is this evil thing that's working against us even today, or worshipers of Baal or something like that.

54:57And so the fact that they could be kind of the same guy is fascinating.

55:03Yeah, it's two different deities trying to fill the same role, trying to be the same thing for the people, and this is why we have the contest of the priests of Baal with Elijah, where they're trying to determine who is ha Elohim, who is the deity.

55:18And the contest is about seeing who can do what a storm deity does, call down fire from heaven to light a sacrifice, or send down lightning to strike a sacrifice and light it on fire, and Baal is unable to do it.

55:32Adonai is able to do it, and so the people cry out, "Adonai, who ha Elohim? Adonai, who ha Elohim?"

55:38He is the deity, basically saying, "He's the real storm deity, Baal is the imposter." And so as Adonai's competition, Baal becomes literally demonized as later on Beelzebub, which we see associated with Satan in the New Testament.

55:58And another indication that Adonai was probably a late importation from outside of Israel is that even before we have the references to the deity Adonai and these inscriptions from the 9th century, even before we have the reference to Israel from around 1208 BCE, we have a couple of inscriptions from Egypt from the early 14th century BCE.

56:24So probably somewhere between about 1390 and about 1350 BCE, and another set of inscriptions from about a century later, where the Egyptians are referring to a people they call the Shazu.

56:37And this means nomads, but they're using it like a name, like a way to kind of dismiss these people, the vagabonds, basically.

56:46And on these lists, we have the land of Shazu of X and the land of Shazu of Y, and this is basically saying the Shazu land that goes by this name, and the Shazu land that goes by this name.

56:59And one of them on there seems to be Seir, which is a region that's to the south near Midian, and so this is a name that's known from the Bible.

57:09But another one is three of the four letters of the tetragrammaton, and then a final character that is interpreted by most as kind of a glottal stop, like an aliph.

57:23And the scholarly consensus is that this is probably the precursor to the divine name Adonai, only in this time period, it's not a divine name, it's a reference to the name of a land.

57:37Adonai.

57:39And so there's a discussion going on right now within the scholarship about what this tells us about the origins of one, the divine name, and to the deity Adonai, because there's a, the scholarly consensus is that the divine name is probably based in some way on this verbal route that means to be.

57:59And so Adonai is the one who is, or there was a, there was a very, very influential scholar named Frank Moore Cross, who back in the 70s suggested that it was causative, the name was a causative version of that route, and so, rather than to be, it is to cause to be or to create.

58:18And so he argued that this was originated in this cultic title. Adonai it's about out, or we know this as the Lord of hosts, but according to this theory it would be the one who creates hosts.

58:34And Latter-day Saints really like this theory because there's another compound name that's very common in the Hebrew Bible, the Lord God, or Adonai Elohim, or according to this theory, the one who creates hosts.

58:47The one who creates gods. So there were a lot of Latter-day Saints who were tickled by that theory, but that's not really the consensus view anymore, but most scholars would say it's probably based on the verb to be.

58:59Now this complicates things, because there's not really a good reason to name this land, the one who is.

59:08And so if the divine name originates in the name of a land, then it probably didn't originate in any verb at all, it's probably just a name.

59:15That was adopted by the deity when the occupants of this land, the inhabitants migrated to the northern hill country and brought their own patron deity with them named Adonai.

59:29And initially this deity would have been incorporated into the pantheon as one of these second-tier deities and probably adopted this storm deity profile and then had to, you know, was in conflict with the existing storm deity.

59:45But at some point they had to exceed to rule over the pantheon. And you can do that by defeating the deity that is in charge of the pantheon, or it seems in this case, like this was done by merging the deities together.

60:02And there are not a ton of examples of a localized ancestral deity that rises to the top of a national pantheon, but it has happened.

60:15So my personal opinion is that someone who was a devotee of Adonai after they were incorporated into the Israelite pantheon probably became king, either by force or by accession or inheritance or something, and decided, I think we can consolidate a lot of power and a lot of rule,

60:37not by keeping the deities separate, not by saying Adonai killed Elle or took Elle's place, but just by merging the two and saying Adonai is Elle.

60:46And that way we get to keep both followings, and we get to be in charge of both followings. And so you have names. Elijah is my God is Adonai, but there are other names that seem to be equations of the two.

61:03Adonai is God. Elle is Adonai. And so most likely in early history of Israel after Adonai comes into the pantheon, someone begins a campaign of conflation to identify Adonai with Elle.

61:20And elsewhere, I've called this the most successful marketing campaign in human history, because this would allow them to have this single deity ruling over Israel who later becomes for their devotees, the only deity that has any power that has any legitimacy at all.

61:41And that's an interesting point, because in the beginning of the Bible, everybody kind of believes in a lot of different gods.

61:52Like monotheism is not that there is only one God, but rather that we only have one God, and then there's all these other gods or whatever.

62:02And eventually, it kind of does whittle down to we really only believe in the one God. Would you say that's true? I would say that that's true, but that was a very long term process that I would argue doesn't reach that kind of final.

62:18And I don't want to call it a final point, because that's a little too teleological, like we had to get there. We don't get to the point of this philosophical argument that there is only one deity that exists until well after the Bible, because even

62:35at Paul, we have Paul saying there are many gods and many lords, but for us, there is one God, the father, and that doesn't mean we only believe there is one God. It means as far as we're concerned.

62:48There's only one God's all the other ones, man, you can have them. We don't think that they're important. We don't think that they're powerful. It's basically how decent human beings feel about the raiders.

63:02You can have them. We don't need them. Fair enough.

63:07And I think that you see some of this negotiation. I want to bring this up as a final point. One of the, I think one of the most fascinating aspects of looking at how Adonai has come in and kind of appropriated Paul's divine profile is we have some poetry

63:26in the Hebrew Bible where it seems an awful lot like the authors just took poetry that was written in praise of Paul and just wrote Adonai's name in instead.

63:36And there are two instances of these. One is a little less explicit and one I think is pretty darn explicit.

63:42The less explicit one is Psalm 29, which praises Adonai and it talks seven times about the voice of Adonai and talks about the voice of Adonai as thunder, as lightning, as violent weather.

63:57And it talks about three different place names. None of them are in Israel though. They're all north of Israel in what would have been Phoenicia at the time. And Phoenicia is a place where the patron deity was Paul.

64:13And so this was likely some poetry praising Paul and as the storm deity that was appropriated and somebody went in and went and erased Paul's name and wrote Adonai in instead.

64:27And then another one where we actually have the smoking gun so to speak is Isaiah 27 one, where we have this prophecy that's Adonai will defeat Leviathan, this kind of mythological dragon slash serpent.

64:44And it says that Adonai will defeat the wriggling serpent will defeat the twisting serpent, the dragon that lives in the sea.

64:54And these are, this is interesting poetry, but among those Eucharitic texts that I referenced earlier.

65:00There's a discussion of ball as the one who beat lowton, and this is the Eucharitic counterpart to the name Leviathan. And the text says ball defeated the wriggling serpent ball defeated the twisting serpent ball defeated the dragon with seven heads.

65:19And this comes from 500 years before Isaiah, but the, it is written in another language, but the words are directly cognate.

65:30And so very clearly whoever wrote Isaiah 27 one was borrowing from, at some point somehow this literature this poetry had filtered down to something in Hebrew.

65:42And they borrowed from this literature that originally was praise of ball. And so I think this is another piece of the puzzle that suggests that Adonai originates in a storm deity this youthful warrior deity who is in charge of violent

65:59weather, and they get incorporated into this pantheon and get merged with this deity who is not a youthful violent warrior, but an aged benevolent high deity.

66:12And we have both of these images of God filtering down throughout the discussion of deity in the rest of the Bible. I think it's a fascinating story. And I hope we discover more things about the origins of Adonai in the future.

66:29Fascinating. I love all of that. Thank you so much. That'll be useful as we continue to explore the Bible and we'll do more of those going forward.

66:40Well, that's our show friends. Thanks so much for tuning in. We sure do appreciate it. And we will talk to you again next week.

66:49Bye everybody.