Ep 22: Connecting With Source

00:00(upbeat music)

00:02- That's where you get the ritual Leviticus 16,

00:05the famous Day of Atonement ritual,

00:07where the priest has to sort of lay his hands

00:10on the head of that scapegoat

00:12and confess all of the sins of the Israelites over it

00:16and then vanish that goat into the wilderness.

00:19It's only the rabbis who say it has to get driven over a cliff.

00:22That's not actually a Leviticus.

00:23Love that addition, but it's not actually a Leviticus.

00:26It just gets driven into the wilderness of Leviticus.

00:28- Also, I've seen goats on cliffs.

00:30They're actually very short-footed.

00:31I don't want that to work, so.

00:33- You know, those are, they are quite good climbers, I have to say.

00:37- We need a David Attenborough special

00:39following the scapegoat into the desert.

00:42(upbeat music)

00:45Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

00:48- And I'm Dan Beecher.

00:49- And you are listening to the Data Overdogma podcast

00:52where we try to increase the public's access

00:54to the academic study of the Bible and religion

00:56and combat the spread of misinformation

00:59about the same.

01:01How are things today, Dan?

01:02- Man, I'm excited.

01:04We're gonna increase some public, whatever you just said.

01:09- Access.

01:10- We're gonna do that thing 'cause we have--

01:12- We have work to do it.

01:13- We got double the scholars on today's show,

01:15so I think that's always a good thing.

01:17- Speaking of which, we have a guest today.

01:20This is Leanne Feldman,

01:21assistant professor of religion at Princeton University,

01:24newly minted assistant professor of religion there.

01:27How are things today, Leanne?

01:30- Things are great.

01:31It's finally starting to feel like fall,

01:33so I'm excited.

01:33- I'm not as excited.

01:36I have a, I now my oldest daughter

01:38started high school a couple weeks ago,

01:40and so I'm having a whole new type of existential crisis.

01:44- You're an old man.

01:45- Yeah, and it's also still in the 90s in Utah, so yeah.

01:49- Yes, that doesn't help.

01:51- It does not.

01:52Leanne is the author of the recent,

01:54The Consuming Fire, the complete priestly source

01:57from creation to the promised land,

02:00which is a wonderful, not incredibly thick book,

02:03very accessible translation of what scholars

02:07so lovingly refer to as P, the priestly source.

02:10And I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity

02:13to discuss a little bit about penitucal composition,

02:17the theories that are out there,

02:18and the nature and function of the priestly source

02:21for our audience, and thus we have Leanne here with us today.

02:28Just to start, I read through the preface

02:31in the translator's note and everything else,

02:34but would you mind telling our audience

02:37where the idea for this book came from,

02:39and why you think, why this is an important book

02:42for the public to have?

02:43- Sure, so the idea for this book initially came from,

02:48honestly, a lot of my colleagues.

02:51I realized as I was working on my first book,

02:56revising the dissertation, turning it into a book,

02:58that I had a good sense of what P was

03:03and what the scope of the story looked like,

03:05and all of its ins and outs,

03:07but that a lot of my colleagues

03:10who aren't penitucal specialists had no idea,

03:14or they would know some basics,

03:15like we all know Leviticus as part of P,

03:17but I would get these requests from colleagues of mine,

03:20like, could you send me the P story of the plagues,

03:23or could you send me the P story of the flood,

03:26or, you know, and so I was making these one off,

03:29like, word documents, using sort of NRSV

03:33or JPS translations, just putting it together

03:35and then adjusting where necessary

03:37for a lot of my colleagues who are asking for these things,

03:40and I realized pretty quickly, gosh,

03:43it would be really useful if I could just take this knowledge

03:46that's in my head that I've been working on for a decade,

03:49that a lot of us specialists,

03:50and I say a lot of us probably like 20 of us in the world,

03:53have in our head, but for me, that sounds like a lot,

03:56and make it a little bit more accessible.

03:59And then the pandemic hit,

04:01and the project that I was supposed to be working on,

04:03I didn't have access to libraries,

04:05so I was like, you know what?

04:07I have everything I need to do this at home, mostly,

04:11and so it was an opportunity for me to take time

04:14during COVID and just dive into this project

04:16since I couldn't work on what I had planned to work on.

04:19- So for those of us who aren't in the world

04:23with Biblical scholarship,

04:24let's go back and start at the very beginning of this

04:27and talk about what is P,

04:29what are we actually referencing with that?

04:31- Sure, so what we're referencing with that

04:34is there has been, you know, for the last, I don't know,

04:38250 years or so, 250, depending on where you wanna date it.

04:43This theory that the Pentateuch,

04:46the first five books of the Hebrew Bible,

04:48are a composite text,

04:49meaning they are written, the materials in Genesis

04:53through Deuteronomy are written by a number

04:55of different authors that were sort of later combined

04:58together by one or more editors.

05:01That's a sticking point.

05:02I can get into it if you want, but we don't have to.

05:06And so one of those sources,

05:09one of those distinctive strands

05:12has been identified pretty early on as the priestly source.

05:16I actually hate that terminology.

05:19- Do you have a sense of why it was called that?

05:22- It was called that, yeah.

05:24So it was called that because of Leviticus, largely,

05:27because Leviticus as part is the only book

05:31in the Pentateuch, in my opinion,

05:34that belongs wholly to one source,

05:36and Leviticus is full of sacrificial instructions,

05:39rules around the ordination of the priesthood,

05:42laws around purity and impurity.

05:43So it has to do with things related to the cult

05:46and the priests who run that cult.

05:48So that is largely, I think, where it got its name.

05:52It wasn't its original name back in the late 1800s early,

05:57sorry, late 1800s, early 1900s,

06:02Vell hasn't actually called it the Q source

06:04for covenants, which is one of the narrative themes

06:09that he saw in it, but that didn't stick.

06:12And we got the P source.

06:14And much as I don't love that terminology,

06:17it is what stopped him, so I did keep it for this

06:20because that way people know what it is.

06:22- If you were given the prerogative to rename it,

06:27do you have something in mind that you would prefer?

06:30- Yeah, that was the hard one.

06:31I actually don't know what I would rename it.

06:34I mean, we obviously called it the Consuming Fire.

06:37That was more of a work of the editorial team

06:42at the University of California Press than myself.

06:46They wanted something a little bit catchier,

06:48so they went with that.

06:49And I think it at least fits the source,

06:51so I'm okay with it.

06:53I actually am not quite sure if there's a quick, easy name

06:56that I would name it.

06:57If I were taking ancient naming conventions,

07:00I might just call it when God began.

07:02Let's start with their sheet.

07:04Let's start with the first couple of words.

07:05That doesn't really capture what the story is about though.

07:08- So how would, let's say one of the people

07:12who are strangely responsible for the collation of this source?

07:17Let's say they got into an argument

07:18with somebody who was a proponent of D or something like that.

07:22What would they highlight as the most important parts

07:26of their source?

07:27What stands out as why it's important to have

07:32what we now refer to as P?

07:33- Yeah, so I think one of the most important parts

07:37of this source, one of the things that comes through in P

07:40they come through quite so strongly in any of the other

07:42sources, D included, is the idea that the Israelite

07:47called the sanctuary, the sacrifices made at that sanctuary

07:53are really the center of the life of Israelites.

07:57And that it's not something that is distant

08:01from their day-to-day activities,

08:03but that it's wholly and completely bound up

08:05in how their community is organized,

08:08how their life is arranged and that the Israelites

08:11are fundamentally necessary for the maintenance

08:15and ongoing sort of continuation of this cult.

08:18And that right there is why I don't like calling

08:20the priestly source because it makes it sound

08:22like it's about the priests.

08:23And I really think that the priests are a part of it,

08:27but they are a means to an end of the Israelites

08:29really supporting this enterprise.

08:31And by calling it the priestly source,

08:33you kind of erase some of the lay Israelite

08:36involvement in the enterprise.

08:38- Okay, so everybody is contributing

08:40to the successful execution of all these cultic maneuvers

08:45and everything.

08:46And within P, do we see the concern for how this activity

08:51contributes to cosmic order, to social order,

08:56to all those things, or is that coming from outside of P?

09:01- Yeah, so I do think it's coming from within P to a degree.

09:06So, and here I should say, I'm talking about P

09:10as if it's a unified whole.

09:12And I sort of treat it as a unified whole in this book

09:15and that's a specific sort of editorial decision

09:18on my part.

09:19P itself is multiple strata and over the course

09:24of a few hundred years by multiple different scribes.

09:26So not every stratum of P thinks exactly the same thing.

09:31But I think what binds them together

09:32is that they all bind to fundamentally the same story

09:35and largely the same worldview,

09:37even as they quibble about how that might be executed.

09:40So with that caveat in place, yeah.

09:45So some of sort of the cosmic order that P

09:48is working with developing advancing in this text,

09:53it's actually far more pronounced

09:58than in some of the other sources that we have.

10:01And here it's the idea that there's sort of a place

10:05for everything and there's a particular sequence

10:08that everything sort of works or functions in.

10:12But what's interesting to me is it's not fixed, right?

10:15So we see this at first in Genesis one with things

10:19being sort of put in order on each of the six days

10:22and then the seventh day being rest.

10:24And God creates this world that is good.

10:28And almost immediately after the creation of that world,

10:32it's no longer good.

10:34What God sets up in Genesis one

10:37is supposed to be sort of a well-oiled machine

10:39that runs on its own without much interference from him at all.

10:42And it falls apart and the wheels come off right away.

10:46And by Genesis six, which comes pretty closely

10:49after Genesis one, and we don't have any of the Cain

10:52and Abel or the Adam and Eve story in P.

10:55So by Genesis six, the world is full of violence.

10:58The order that God has set up between animals and humans

11:02not killing each other that has fallen apart.

11:04There's bloodshed everywhere.

11:06And God realizes very quickly this idea that I had

11:09about how things would work, it's not going to work.

11:12I have to revise.

11:14And this is, I think, one of the really unique parts

11:16about P is it's a God that's constantly revising

11:19and reacting to what's going on on the ground.

11:22So it's not a sort of all-knowing God

11:24that knows what's going on from the beginning.

11:26It's a God that's reacting to sort of

11:28the unpredictability of their creation.

11:32And so some of that is actually built

11:34into the fabric of how this works.

11:36That's actually the impetus for why the cult exists

11:39in the first place is that because of that,

11:42peace God decides, I'm going to have to live on the earth.

11:45So I can keep a little bit of a closer eye on them.

11:47- Oh wow.

11:48- And the entirety of the sanctuary,

11:52the tabernacle, the sacrificial rules,

11:54the purity laws, all of that,

11:57is actually enabling God to live on earth.

12:01Like that's the, how is this going to work?

12:05So that's sort of bringing a kind of cosmic order

12:08of the separation between holiness and impurity,

12:13'cause God is fundamentally imagined as this holy thing,

12:19the epitome of holiness, not so hard to understand why.

12:22But holiness in peace can't really coexist with impurity.

12:27It's kind of like oil and water, they sort of repel.

12:31And impurity is not a bad thing,

12:33but it's just what human beings are.

12:35Just by the nature of living, they generate impurity.

12:38So in order for God to exist on earth,

12:42there has to be some sort of pure space.

12:48Now this pure space there for a long time,

12:51the understanding of a lot of the ritual

12:54and cult that's going on in places like Leviticus,

12:57the idea was that this was cleansing the people.

13:00But my understanding is that since the 70s and later,

13:03and even before that to some degree,

13:06the idea is now, no, this is cleansing the space

13:10from the people so that God's presence can dwell there,

13:14so that they are not driven out.

13:15And we see similar ideas where this sin

13:18that people are committing,

13:19it generates kind of a metaphysical contamination

13:22that pollutes the land.

13:24And so it's not so much something internal interior

13:27to people or their spirits,

13:28it's the fact that we are generating contamination

13:31that is polluting the space or the land,

13:33and then either God cannot dwell there,

13:36or the land cannot tolerate the presence of the people there.

13:41Is that a fair assessment of where things stand these days

13:44on ritual theory?

13:46- Yeah, absolutely.

13:47So this was like Barbara Levine, Jacob Milgram,

13:50these are the people in the 70s, 80s, and 90s

13:52who really advanced this.

13:53Jacob Milgram's 3000 page commentary,

13:56which is my introduction to Leviticus

13:58as a first-year master student.

14:00- Oh gosh, that's intimidating.

14:01- If you survive that,

14:03then you must really like Leviticus.

14:05- Yeah.

14:06- So, yeah, that was really sort of one of the things

14:10that Jacob Milgram really advanced.

14:12And there's quibbles and disagreements around

14:14sort of the finer details of how this works.

14:18But by and large, I do think, you know,

14:20Jacob Milgram was largely right,

14:23especially when it comes to sort of

14:25P proper Leviticus one through 16,

14:29give or take a few things here and there.

14:32It gets a little bit different

14:33when we get into the holiness code,

14:35which is one of those other strata of P

14:37that I was talking about,

14:38that that actually does have a little bit more of a focus

14:41on purifying the people themselves.

14:44And this is one of the things that it sort of extends

14:47if it's sort of both and it's purify the space

14:50and purify the people in the holiness code.

14:53But sort of the fundamental base level of P,

14:56sort of the ritual materials really are largely focused

15:01on keeping the physical space pure

15:05and keeping the, removing the things,

15:08the contaminants from impurity,

15:10the contaminants from sin.

15:13This is where people often conflate impurity and sin.

15:17And this is where we get this idea that impurity is sinful.

15:21The way that this system imagines it working,

15:26at least in P, it's again a little bit different in H,

15:29but the way that the system in P imagines it working

15:32is both impurity and sin generate sort of

15:34this miasmic contaminant,

15:36which then magnetically kind of attaches itself

15:39to like holy things.

15:41So you think, for me, if I'm wearing a white shirt,

15:45I will always, always find some kind of dirt.

15:47It just somehow magnetically attracts.

15:49It's kind of that same idea,

15:51but sort of on an invisible level.

15:53This is why I don't wear white.

15:55I'm just kidding, I can't do it.

15:58But this is how, so we have this sort of contamination

16:03from impurity or from sin.

16:05So the mechanism is the same,

16:07but the implications are different.

16:11So impurity is just natural.

16:13It's an inevitable part of human life.

16:17Sin is obviously not inevitable.

16:19It's not, so the ways that these two things

16:23contaminate are a little bit different,

16:24but the fundamental premise is that they both contaminate.

16:27And so both things need to be purified

16:31from the sanctuary quite regularly

16:33in order to keep that sort of clean zone, that pure zone.

16:37So yeah, I can remain.

16:39- I'm curious, would you talk just a little bit

16:40about like what kind of ritualistic things

16:43they would do to purify these areas?

16:48- Yeah, so I'm happy to talk about what they are,

16:50as long as you don't ask me why this is how it works.

16:53(laughing)

16:55Absolutely no idea.

16:57We have yet to see a good explanation for it.

16:59So largely the way that it seems to be imagined to work

17:04is that it's via the sacrifices.

17:06So this is largely what sacrifices for,

17:09especially the involuntary ones,

17:11the what I translate as decontamination offering.

17:13And I hope at this point, it's a little bit clear

17:16why I'm translating it as decontamination offering

17:18and not just purification offering.

17:20So the decontamination offering

17:23and the ASHAAM, the guilt offering.

17:25These two are the ones that really do the work

17:29of cleaning.

17:30And it's these two types of sacrifices in particular

17:35where the regular Israelite slaughters the animal

17:39but the priest manipulates the blood.

17:41And the blood of the animal gets smeared

17:43on very specific places depending on who's offering the animal

17:47and what subtype of decontamination offering it is.

17:52So often it's on the horns of the altar

17:54and there's two altars, so which horns

17:57and which altar depends on how severe the contamination is.

18:01But the idea is that by putting the blood

18:04on the horns of whichever altar is necessary,

18:07that is actually part of the decontamination process.

18:10This blood becomes a kind of ritual detergent

18:13that removes the impurity and removes sort of,

18:18I would say the low to moderate level impurities.

18:21The really, really severe stuff,

18:23sort of the worst of the impurities,

18:26that's where you get the ritual Leviticus 16,

18:28the famous Day of Atonement ritual

18:31where the priest has to sort of lay his hands

18:34on the head of that scapegoat

18:36and confess all of the sins of the Israelites over it

18:40and then banish that goat into the wilderness.

18:43It's only the rabbis who say it has to get driven over a cliff.

18:45That's not actually a Leviticus.

18:47Love that addition.

18:48But it's not actually a Leviticus

18:50that's driven into the wilderness in Leviticus.

18:52- Also I've seen goats on cliffs.

18:53They're actually very short-footed.

18:55I don't like that at all.

18:56- You know, they are quite good climbers, I have to say.

19:01- We need a David Attenborough special

19:03following the scapegoat into the desert.

19:06So I have a question.

19:11We've kind of talked a bit about pee,

19:13but I'd like to situate this

19:15and within the broader scholarship

19:18regarding penitucal composition,

19:19just so people can gain a little bit better purchase

19:22on the relationship of this to other texts.

19:24And you've talked a bit about how he begins in Genesis 1,

19:29goes tiny bit into Genesis 2,

19:31and then we pick up some genealogical stuff in Genesis 5.

19:34We skip over the Benelohim

19:36and in the beginning of Genesis 6,

19:38and we go right into the story of Noah.

19:40So those other stories come from somewhere.

19:42So could you talk a little bit

19:44about the other sources that are hypothesized

19:48to have been brought together into the penituc

19:51and then we'll get into the controversies

19:53about neo-documentarianism and some of the other stuff.

19:57- Okay, I wish Jack do want me to take care of that.

20:00- And I promise you listeners at home,

20:02I'm gonna try to make sure that we all understand this,

20:04everything that's, 'cause these two can clearly

20:08get into weeds that I will never be able to climb into.

20:12So yeah, well, we'll get there.

20:15I love it.

20:16- This is a great practice.

20:16I'm doing this with my students in like two weeks.

20:18So this is awesome.

20:20- Keep me out of the weeds.

20:21- Glad we can do it.

20:22- So yeah, I was gonna say

20:24there's a couple different ways to go about this, right?

20:27The most basic thing to say is that the penituc

20:30is made up of three main blocks of material.

20:34And I think pretty much whatever methodology

20:37you come at this from, a supplementarian methodology

20:41or a neo-documentarian methodology,

20:42we all fundamentally agree about this.

20:44There's the priestly material.

20:46There's the deuteronomic material,

20:48which is mostly everything in deuteronomy,

20:50but not every single word.

20:52- That's what we're calling D?

20:54- You won't we're calling D, yeah.

20:56I don't think supplementarians would necessarily call it D,

20:58but they would identify the same block of material as largely.

21:02And then what I often diplomatically

21:06just call the non-priestly material.

21:08That is everything that's not P and not D.

21:10And the easiest way I can put this is that

21:15almost all of the ink that's been spilled

21:18over a pentatucal composition is about that material,

21:21the non-priestly material.

21:22That's where our greatest disagreements lie.

21:24Not to say we don't have quibbles over bits

21:26and pieces of P and D, we do,

21:29but most of the disagreement

21:32is around the non-priestly materials.

21:34So from a neo-documentarian perspective,

21:37which is the methodology into which I was trained,

21:42and I will caveat this with saying,

21:44I spent all of my graduate years

21:46trading as a neo-documentarian.

21:48I do think it's the best explanation

21:50for the evidence that we have,

21:51but I also am very much not an expert on the J and E,

21:56and I have only ever used neo-documentarianism

22:00in so far as it came to identifying P.

22:02- Can we just, can we take just a second

22:04to describe what neo-documentarianism

22:07as opposed to the other thing that you said?

22:09- Yeah, sure.

22:10So neo-documentarianism is a, let's say, revision,

22:16updating rehabilitation, perhaps,

22:20of the idea introduced by Velhausen,

22:23most famously by Velhausen in the late 19th,

22:27early 20th century, that there are fundamentally four sources

22:30that make up the Pentateuch.

22:33Would he named the Yawest source for us J?

22:37German has no Y, so German is spelled with a J,

22:41so that's why we call it the J source.

22:44The LOS source E, the pre-sleece source P,

22:48and the Deuteronimist source.

22:52Wow, that one is better, or D.

22:56So the idea that there's these four.

22:59- And these four sources is called the documentary hypothesis

23:03'cause the idea is that they were four independent documents

23:06that were circulating on their own

23:08and then were brought together.

23:10- Exactly, so that these were four somewhat parallel,

23:15but still rather different stories

23:17that were written by at least four different people

23:20slash groups of people that at some point,

23:22most scholars would say in the Persian period

23:25were joined together.

23:27And now it might have happened once,

23:29it might have happened a few times,

23:31I'll say out of the weeds on that,

23:33but that's sort of the Velhausen approach.

23:37And one of the ways that he initially

23:42sort of differentiated between these sources

23:44and most famously was by the use of the divine name.

23:47If it says Yahweh, it's the J source,

23:49if it says Elohim, it's the E source.

23:52And this is one of the ways that sort of,

23:54it started to get divided up in Genesis.

23:57And I mean,

24:01lexical considerations of other types of words

24:04also became important later on,

24:05but sort of the most famous recognizable one

24:08is J is says Yahweh and he says Elohim.

24:11That's strictly not,

24:14it works like 80% of the time.

24:16The problem is P also says Elohim for all of Genesis

24:22because it's a plot point in the story in Exodus six

24:28that God introduces himself to Moses as Yahweh

24:32and says, you know, your ancestors knew me as ex,

24:35El Shaddai in that case, Elohim and El Shaddai,

24:39but actually my name is Yahweh.

24:41So it's not a foolproof situation.

24:45- And this is one of the,

24:47I know folks who prefer Mosaic authorship,

24:50not many scholars, but in the broader public,

24:55a lot of folks believe that the document

24:58in our hypothesis is built entirely on this foundation

25:00that oh, if it says Adonai or if it says Elohim,

25:04then that's a different source

25:06and that makes for a rather brutal foundation.

25:08And so it's a way to kind of dismiss the whole thing,

25:11but that's really not the strongest evidence

25:15that we have for these literary layers.

25:18- And so yeah, this is largely the evidence

25:20that was leaned on most heavily in the early 20th century

25:24and that you're like mostly continental European scholars.

25:28If I don't wanna differentiate it completely geographically

25:30'cause there are some American scholars

25:31who also take this approach, but largely,

25:34but that continental European scholarship,

25:37especially German language scholarship

25:40in the mid 20th century, really rightly critiqued.

25:43And like Torah Pardon said, this doesn't work.

25:46And they're right, it doesn't.

25:48So in the late 20th century, 1970s, 80s and really 90s,

25:55a movement at Hebrew University,

25:59Berg Schwartz was one of sort of the spear headers

26:01of this sort of revitalized the documentary hypothesis.

26:05And this is what we call the neo documentary hypothesis,

26:08very obvious naming reasons there.

26:11But there's a much greater focus on sort of concepts

26:17of what makes a narrative

26:22and how do we understand narrative continuity,

26:26narrative coherence, what are the things

26:29that we can point to that show the breakdown of a story?

26:34So from a methodological standpoint,

26:38neo-documentarians will start

26:39with the final form of the Pentateuch.

26:42We'll take all five books and I'll just start reading

26:45and I'm making it sound easy, it's really not.

26:49- Such as tree clay.

26:51- None of this sounds easy, I promise.

26:53- Great, but I start reading and then when I get to a point

26:57where something that's already happened once

27:02happens again without explanation.

27:04So the most obvious one is the world is created

27:06in Genesis one and then it's created again in Genesis two.

27:09What?

27:10There's no sort of reconciling of that.

27:13Or when I get to sort of irreconcilable facts,

27:16the flood lasts 40 days or it lasts 150 days,

27:19the bird is a dove, the bird is a raven.

27:22These are the kind of two,

27:26some of the flagship main things that we point to.

27:31But there's all sorts of smaller contradictions like that.

27:35A character, all of a sudden seems to forget something

27:38that they had just said or just done

27:40and proceeds in a completely different direction.

27:43The characterization of a particular character

27:45is completely wildly different.

27:48These are the kind of things that we sort of flag

27:50and we start to delineate sources on the basis

27:53of what we call narrative inconsistencies

27:55or narrative contradictions.

27:58So, you know, another famous one is Moses, in Exodus,

28:02Moses goes up the mountain twice in a row

28:03without coming down.

28:04How's that working?

28:07So we sort of look at that.

28:08And when you start looking at these,

28:09when you start tracking these,

28:10you can sort of break them apart and see different strands.

28:14That's the really basic way of putting it.

28:17And what neo-documentarians argue is that when you break apart

28:20these strands without adding any words,

28:24without subtracting any words,

28:26without changing the order of any words

28:28with a few exceptions,

28:29I literally just published an essay

28:30with changing a couple orders.

28:31But without, you know, changing the order of most words,

28:37you have very continuous, coherent, consistent stories.

28:42And that's what makes it so compelling to me

28:45is that you can get these four continuous stories

28:50that really make sense.

28:52And they actually tell fundamentally different stories

28:54and they're internally consistent

28:55in terms of their characterization,

28:57in terms of their worldviews,

28:59in terms of the particular arguments that they're making.

29:01So when I'm talking about J, E, P, and D,

29:03I'm talking about four independent stories.

29:06- So are we, sorry, this just clicked for me.

29:10When you talk about these different sources,

29:14do we have ancient source materials?

29:17Or are these reconstructions based on pulling

29:20what we currently have apart?

29:22- These are complete reconstructions.

29:24- Okay, okay, I had not understood that.

29:26I'm kind of dumb, so that's really interesting to me.

29:31- Yeah, so most people don't realize

29:34that this is all hypothesis,

29:35same on the supplementary,

29:36which I'm happy to explain also.

29:38- I think a really fun example is, well, for me, fun,

29:42for most people, just mind-numbingly dull.

29:44But a fun example is the story of Joseph being sold

29:48in this slavery, because we seem to have, again,

29:51these narrative incongruities,

29:53and is it the Midianites, is it the Ishmaelites,

29:57and they're all kinds of apologetic attempts

29:59to kind of gin up background details

30:02that aren't in the story to make it all fit.

30:04But you can tease these things apart

30:06based on these incongruities,

30:08and you come up with two somewhat parallel stories,

30:11their own beginnings, their own middles,

30:13and their own ends.

30:14And they tell the story in a different way.

30:16And that's one example where it doesn't seem

30:19like anything was lost.

30:20It seems like someone literally just took two stories

30:23and just kind of wove them together,

30:25which I think is very strong evidence

30:28that, at least in that case,

30:30we have very two clear different sources for this story.

30:33When we think about the Pentateuch as five separate books,

30:36you point out in the introduction

30:40that this division into five books was probably a product

30:43of technological limitations

30:46where they could not preserve the entire thing

30:48on a single scroll.

30:50And so it might not have been

30:52that all these sources came together to produce Genesis

30:55and then came together to produce Exodus,

30:58but that there was a single corpus

31:01that was being brought together.

31:03And then at some point along the line,

31:05they were divided up into these kind of macro narratives

31:09with all the different patriarchal cycles of Genesis

31:12and then getting into the story of the Exodus.

31:14Could you talk a little bit about that?

31:16'Cause I think that might surprise an awful lot of people.

31:18- Yeah.

31:19So I find this surprise as my students all the time

31:22is that the idea of these books

31:24of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy,

31:28no scribe set out to write Genesis.

31:31No scribe even set out to write Leviticus.

31:33And I can get into some arguments

31:35with, especially I'm thinking here,

31:36if Christophne Han might disagree with me here.

31:40But I think no scribe set out to write Leviticus.

31:42Instead, what we have is...

31:46So when these stories were put together,

31:49at least from a neo-documentarian perspective,

31:52it's really on the basis of chronology

31:54within the world of the story.

31:56So, you know, Moses goes up the mountain

32:00and the next thing that happens is he's on the mountain.

32:02The next thing that happens is that he comes down.

32:04So when you have different parts of the story

32:05or with, you know, the Genesis 37 example, Joseph,

32:09being sold, you know, you have to...

32:12When you have two stories that you have,

32:15and I often do this exercise with my students, right?

32:17I often say you have these two stories, put them together,

32:20turn them into one story without getting rid of anything.

32:23How would you do it?

32:24And very often they do actually use chronology.

32:27I don't tell them, I don't give them any hints

32:29about how it might have been done.

32:31But the thing that makes the most sense

32:32is to follow the chronology of the story.

32:35And so when we do that,

32:37these texts obviously become much longer.

32:40And so this idea that technology is the limiting factor,

32:45I get from a series of articles that Manacham Haran wrote

32:49in the '70s and '80s, I think there's like 10 or 11 articles

32:53or something like that, that he wrote in various venues

32:57for about a decade, that he talks about and analyzes,

33:02given what we know about the scrolls at Khumran,

33:05how long could a scroll have been?

33:07How long could a physical scroll,

33:10how much text could it actually support?

33:15And so he looks at some of the longest scrolls we have,

33:18and he finds that it could support

33:20about the length of one of the Pentateuchal books

33:23and that give or take,

33:24most of the Pentateuchal books are about the same length.

33:29And we have, I mean, I guess I should say,

33:34I should correct that and say a little bit more,

33:37like it's just a little bit more

33:38than what the Pentateuchal books can hold,

33:40'cause we actually do have scrolls from Khumran

33:43that are Genesis Exodus or Exodus Leviticus

33:45that can hold parts of both books that sort of go over,

33:48not the entirety of both, but at least parts of both books.

33:52But what Haran really importantly argued

33:57is that these divisions between the books are not arbitrary.

34:02It's not the scribe wrote until he got to the end

34:04of the scroll and said, I'm gonna stop here.

34:07Guess I need a new page, you know,

34:09or guess I need a new notebook to fill this in

34:11and sort of modern terminology.

34:13Though nobody used notebooks, no book anymore,

34:16so I'm so modern.

34:19But they're also thematic.

34:21So you pick a point in the story where it makes sense

34:26that's about the length of material

34:29that would have fit on a scroll, but makes sense.

34:31So what we get is, you know,

34:34creation to the Israelites in Egypt, that makes sense.

34:38The departure from Egypt,

34:39the story that starts in Exodus 1,

34:41until they get to the setting up of the tabernacle,

34:45what I call the dwelling place and the translation.

34:50At the end of Exodus, that makes sense as a unit.

34:53We have sort of the cultic rules and the purity laws

34:56that make sense as a unit.

34:58The wilderness wanderings make sense as a unit.

35:01So it's sort of grouping sort of almost five acts of a play

35:05if you wanna use drama language,

35:07figuring out where those most logically break.

35:11And in some cases, you know, it makes perfect sense.

35:13In some cases, I would quibble a little bit

35:15and you can see, you know,

35:16I put my divisions in this translation

35:19often across book lines.

35:21You know, my chapters don't quite line up

35:24with the chapter or book divisions that we currently have.

35:29But yeah, these decisions were often made

35:33based on technological limitations

35:35and based on sort of thematic arcs, so to speak.

35:40- So you mentioned that Qumran, some texts where

35:44you go over the book and include a little bit of Exodus.

35:48I don't recall having seen in the manuscripts,

35:52but is there a very clear break in the transcription

35:56where we get to our book divisions?

35:58So the main question is,

36:00do we already have our standardized book divisions

36:02when these scrolls are being transcribed?

36:05Or is it something that's in flux

36:08even in that time period?

36:09- I love this question so much because the assumption

36:12is that yes, we have standard book divisions,

36:15but I actually think one of the entirely different project

36:19I'm working on that I'm not gonna get into

36:21because it's still incredibly hypothetical at the moment

36:23and I may be very, very wrong.

36:25But part of it was looking at sort of the extent

36:28of these scrolls.

36:30And as best as I can tell, there is one fragment

36:33because the thing to remember about these pentatucal texts

36:36is that they are so incredibly fragmentary.

36:38There are very, very few pieces that contain more than

36:42at most two lines, three lines.

36:46There's a section of Leviticus that's longer

36:48that I got to see in person this summer

36:49that was incredible, but for most of these texts,

36:54we're talking tiny, tiny fragments

36:55with a few words on them, a couple of letters.

36:59So we don't actually have a continuous text.

37:03So when I'm talking about these scrolls

37:04that are Genesis Exodus or Exodus Leviticus

37:07or Leviticus numbers, these are scrolls

37:09that the original editors determined were in the same hand,

37:14largely material that looks like it's from the same parchment.

37:19So they're calling them the same scrolls,

37:21probably found in the same area.

37:24So they can determine that these are from the same scrolls.

37:27There's actually DNA testing being done on some of these scrolls

37:31right now, which is super interesting to figure out

37:33are they actually from the same parchment?

37:34Can we corroborate some of this?

37:37But all that to say, as far as I can tell,

37:41there's exactly one fragment that has the last letter

37:44of the book of Genesis and perhaps the first letter or two

37:49of the book of Exodus on it and there's the gap.

37:51There's not like a line gap.

37:54It's just like a gap in the line.

37:56But it is also a sort of change in this,

38:02you know, it's a change in scene in the story.

38:04We have fragments very clearly that have, you know,

38:09chapter breaks, there are logical breaks

38:12that also have gaps like that.

38:13So I don't know.

38:15The question is it may have been preserved,

38:19but the fact that we have what scholars tell us

38:22is Genesis Exodus, Exodus Leviticus,

38:25and that if those don't line up, they're not all the same, right?

38:28They don't line up at the same start in Genesis

38:30and the same ending in Exodus.

38:32Some of that may just be because we don't have those fragments.

38:34- Right, yeah.

38:36- So I don't want to read too much into it,

38:38but to me, it seems like it may not have been

38:42quite as stable as we think it is.

38:44- Okay.

38:45- So it could still be an open question

38:48if the divisions of the books had become standardized

38:52by that point.

38:53- Yeah, we know that they're pretty standard,

38:55but it's like later, a few centuries into the common era.

38:58That's when we have really good evidence

38:59that they've standardized.

39:01- So speaking of dating, I know a question that I have

39:04and I imagine a lot of people are going to have

39:07is you've mentioned that there were several literary layers

39:10that the coming together of P is something that took a long time.

39:15When do you date the first attempt

39:18to collate what we would call the first layer of P?

39:23- So what I think the oldest layer of P is?

39:27- Yeah.

39:28- I think it's funny, the more I work on this text,

39:33the later the date starts to get.

39:36(laughing)

39:37But I do think I would still hold to late seventh,

39:42like seventh to sixth century context.

39:46I do think we have some material here.

39:48And it's mostly me looking at the architecture,

39:53described the tabernacle and really seeing

39:56Neo-Assyrian style temple blueprint.

40:02- Okay.

40:03- And that a lot of the temple sites

40:07that we see in places like Tel Dan, Tel Tainat,

40:11Indara, they all share this kind of Tel Arad as well.

40:15They all share this kind of tripartite

40:17three room sanctuary plan,

40:21which is a very sort of Neo-Assyrian plan

40:23that we see from roughly the 10th to the seventh sixth century

40:28that that's sort of its heyday.

40:30So part of it is I'm still kind of clinging

40:33to that a little bit and saying,

40:34this is what's being reflected here, maybe.

40:39(laughing)

40:41You know, I hold it very lightly,

40:42but I do think that some of what we see here

40:46may be sort of seventh, sixth century,

40:48but probably not the majority of it.

40:50- Okay.

40:51Now once we get into the sixth century,

40:53now we're talking about the Babylonian exile.

40:55We're talking about a period when there was no temple.

40:59Are you of the opinion that a lot of this

41:02is really folks who are outside of Israel

41:05kind of fantasizing, kind of trying to put together

41:09and organize in their heads how they want this all to work,

41:12even in the absence of the cult?

41:14Or is this mostly coming after they come back

41:17and are re-establishing the cult?

41:19- Yeah, so this is a hard question for me to answer

41:22because so here I really love Benjamin Summer's piece

41:26on pseudo-historicism and the perils of dating the Pentateuch.

41:30I'm messing up that title, but it has all those pieces in it.

41:33(laughing)

41:36And he makes a really compelling argument in that article

41:40that we could just as easily place something,

41:45I don't know if he uses P specifically,

41:47but we could just as easily place something

41:49like the construction of this elaborate narrative

41:51about a sanctuary in the exile with somebody longing

41:55for a return, trying to, you know, like Ezekiel,

41:58trying to imagine what will be when the time comes.

42:03We can also very easily place it at the return

42:07as a program for the rebuilding as a program

42:12for sort of the ideal in the early Persian period

42:14about what it should be, or we could put it pre-exilic

42:16and say this is how it was and they're reflecting.

42:20So what for me when it could equally make sense

42:22in any of those contexts, I don't wanna guess

42:25which context it's in because it doesn't feel like

42:28there is solid ground to do so.

42:32And then it just becomes guesswork on my part.

42:35And I think it's one of the things I say

42:37in the dating section, 'cause I, you know,

42:40much as I often resist dating,

42:41I did write a section in the introduction on the dating,

42:45but at the end of that section,

42:46I said one of the things that's very distinctive about P

42:50is that it fundamentally, in the way it tells its story,

42:53resists being dated.

42:55In a way that kind of makes the story present itself

42:59as timeless, present itself as trying to defy geopolitical

43:04movements and changes in particular situations.

43:10So I want to respect the fact that it's actually not

43:14giving us any good hooks.

43:17There are a few, like in terms of economics

43:20and architecture, like we can get a few hooks

43:22that at least there's things in the real world

43:24that are being reflected.

43:26But in terms of dating the whole,

43:28dating why somebody might have written this,

43:31I have no idea.

43:34And I wish I did, I wish I could go back to that period

43:37and ask or watch somebody write this so I could figure out

43:40what it was.

43:41But I think that that's one of the things that's both

43:45frustrating and beautiful about this text

43:47is that it really does actively resist that.

43:50- And I think that that's ambiguity,

43:53the fact that it can work in so many different settings,

43:55I think is one of the reasons that Genesis One at least

44:00does seem to transcend that and seem to function

44:03as something that a lot of people understand

44:05as just this very poetic kind of absolute beginning

44:09that is not easily reducible to a given ideology

44:14or historical period, which brings me to another question

44:19I wanted to ask about translation.

44:22'Cause you talk a little bit about translation philosophy

44:24in here and there are two parts

44:27that I wanted to get your thoughts on.

44:29One, I appreciate it very much the way you talked about

44:31the fact that a lot of the kind of lexicalized terms

44:36that we use in contemporary translations

44:39are really just kind of incidental lexicalization

44:44of overly literal renderings from the King James version

44:49and elsewhere.

44:51And could you talk a little bit about why you think

44:53it is more helpful to kind of break that habit,

44:57how it can render things both more foreign

45:02and more familiar to not use the terms

45:05that have become traditional?

45:07- Yeah, so one of the big ones for me

45:10in this translation was tabernacle.

45:11And I've used it, I don't know how many times

45:13in the center of you 'cause it's a really hard habit

45:15to break and when it comes to speaking with other scholars

45:17I just default to tabernacle because that's what they know

45:21and that's how I communicate effectively.

45:24But I categorically refuse to translate

45:27mishcan as tabernacle in this translation.

45:31Now, I never learned Latin so forgive me

45:36all those who are listening who do know Latin

45:39but my understanding of the research I did

45:41is that tabernacle is a pretty literal translation

45:44of mishcan in the Latin meaning like hut house

45:49and that's fantastic because that means

45:52that when we had it translated via the Vulgate

45:55and into the King James tabernacle really was capturing

46:00the idea that this sanctuary, this mishcan

46:03is a physical home for the deity to dwell in.

46:06But my issue with using that is that it's become

46:09it's become a pretty static term in modern American English

46:13and my aim was to translate this into modern American English.

46:15That was what I was going for.

46:19And we hear tabernacle and we think, you know,

46:22either at the Mormon choir, you know, there's that.

46:27We think, you know, there's churches with the name

46:29tabernacle in the name or we think some weird structure

46:34that I'm not quite sure what it is.

46:37It seems kind of, it's some particular ritual thing

46:40and I don't know what that is.

46:42That's often what I get from students.

46:43Oh, that ritual thing when I say tabernacle

46:47and that actually takes the structure

46:49that is quite literally, in my opinion,

46:51the beating heart of the pea source

46:53and makes it completely sterile.

46:59It makes it something so other that we actually forget

47:03and the word tabernacle enables the reader

47:07to forget what it is because it's not something

47:10that we're familiar with.

47:11And mishcan quite literally in Hebrew

47:14means the place of dwelling, the verb there means to dwell

47:19or to live in the memo on the beginning of it

47:22as sort of a type of noun that indicates a place

47:25where something happens.

47:26So it quite literally means dwelling place.

47:29And that really is one of the fundamental points

47:32of this story, the reason this exists,

47:35the reason we have all of these complicated, you know,

47:38to our perspective, complicated instructions

47:41is so that the deity can dwell among the Israelites on Earth.

47:46And that is fundamentally what this mishcan structure is for.

47:50And so I wanted readers to be confronted with that

47:52over and over again as dwelling place,

47:55dwelling place, dwelling place

47:56so that you can't forget the central role of this.

47:59You can't think of it as something sterile or other

48:03but that it actually becomes hopefully that, you know,

48:06that home, that breathing entity that it actually is

48:08in the task.

48:10And I think that's such an important part

48:12of translating a text with which so many people

48:14are familiar is defamiliarizing things

48:17so that we take notice of it

48:20and then actually dedicate some cognitive effort

48:23to figuring out what is this referring to?

48:26'Cause yeah, we'll just glide right past the word tabernacle

48:30without thinking about it at all.

48:31And another, the very beginning of Genesis 1

48:36in your translation was something I commented on on Twitter,

48:39something I talk about, about every three or four weeks,

48:42I have to bring it up on my social media.

48:45And it was what we talked about the very first episode

48:47of the Data Over Dogma podcast.

48:49Can you tell me why you rendered for Genesis 1 1

48:53when God began to create?

48:55- Oh yeah, I thought you were going with total of a bubble

48:59there so sorry, I was like, I was going in.

49:02- Well, that's part of, that's right there

49:05in the next clause, I'd love to hear about that as well.

49:09But I think that all of it together would be wonderful.

49:12- Yeah, oh, I've seen you talk about this

49:14on various social media things.

49:15So, I mean, I feel like I'm just gonna be repeating

49:17your words here because what you're saying about them is.

49:20- Well, out of the mouths of two witnesses, so.

49:22(laughing)

49:25- But yeah, basically, you know, we can translate,

49:29I think historically it's been translated

49:31in the beginning, but really Barashit is a construct phrase

49:37which in Hebrew means it is bound,

49:39it is tied to the word that comes next.

49:42So that's often a relationship X of Y.

49:45So here because it's verbal,

49:49we have when God began, Barashit Barah is when God began,

49:53it's just that's the particular syntactical formation

49:58that this is.

50:00And so it becomes kind of the introductory clause

50:04to a more complicated sentence.

50:05The then goes on to describe the conditions.

50:08So when God began to create the heavens and the earth,

50:13what did it look like?

50:14And then so in verses two and three,

50:16we have sort of a longer description of what that looked like.

50:19What was the material with which God was working?

50:22What did it look like at that point of beginning?

50:25- And it looked Tohuvavohu, which you render.

50:28And I think to some degree,

50:31following a little bit after Alter's attempt

50:33to try to maintain some of the alliteration,

50:36how did you go about verse two?

50:38- Yeah, so I, you know, for as much as I quibble

50:43with bits and pieces of Alter's translation style

50:46and I've taught translation seminars with grad students

50:50and we go at it in those seminars,

50:52that he was on to something.

50:56And I think Fox did this also,

50:59although I don't have that.

51:00That's in my office at Princeton.

51:03So I don't have that one to look at,

51:04but at least with Alter,

51:06he translated as Welter and Waste,

51:09which I think Tohuvavohu is, you know,

51:12it's two words in Hebrew, all three,

51:15but two in Hebrew that are sort of allerative, rhyming.

51:19They have a particular cadence to them.

51:22They're also kind of nonsense words.

51:24They don't have a real specific meaning to them.

51:29In fact, I've recently learned

51:32that they've come into other languages as me.

51:35And I think there's like, in German,

51:38it's come into German as a static phrase,

51:41which is fascinating to me.

51:43A friend of mine did a thread somewhere on this.

51:46I probably should have looked that up.

51:48I don't remember exactly the German.

51:50- There's a new edition of the Aynheitzu Bazette soon

51:52from a couple of years ago that likes to transliterate

51:56where they think that the style is more important

51:59than the substance.

52:00So like Isaiah, Kavlakov, Kavlakov, Tavlakov, Tavlakov.

52:05They just transliterate.

52:06So that could be where we see that, but that's interesting.

52:11- So it becomes this kind of word that it's this phrase

52:16that's very, very difficult to translate.

52:17And I appreciated Altar there trying to keep

52:21some of the alliteration,

52:22because one of the things that you said

52:24just a little while ago was that Genesis 1

52:26is very poetic sounding.

52:29It has that sort of high language.

52:31I'm not gonna call it poetry.

52:32I'm not on the bandwagon that calls it poetry,

52:35but it has a poetic nature to it.

52:37And Tahuvahvahvoo is that.

52:39I did sort of take issue with Altar's welter in waste

52:43because it's not communicating.

52:46It kind of communicates a wasteland.

52:49It communicates, like when I hear welter in waste,

52:51I think kind of dry arid wasteland,

52:55kind of like the similar to often you'll see

52:58Tahuvahvoo who translated as formless and void.

53:02And so that's what I was really trying to get away from

53:05because in there's this misconception that in Genesis,

53:10in Genesis 1, it is creation out of nothing

53:15that started with nothing and just created

53:18all the parts of the world.

53:19And that's genuinely not what this text is saying.

53:23What this text is describing, if we go on,

53:26is a world that is really sort of watery.

53:29The land emerges out of the water.

53:32God kind of gathers the waters and the land comes up.

53:35Everything's all of the stuff and substance of creation

53:39is already there under these waters.

53:41And it's the act of separating them,

53:43of moving them, of pooling them that enables creation.

53:47So I really wanted to get at the swampiness.

53:54'Cause if I think about like all sorts of stuff

53:56hidden in water, like I can kind of like murky swampy.

53:59And so I landed on Merck first

54:01'cause I'm like, it's kind of messy.

54:03And like what else has kind of got that watery,

54:06slightly messy sense.

54:08And so I went with Meyer and so I went with Meyer and Merck

54:11to try to get that.

54:13'Cause those words for me have oaked a little bit

54:15of a wateriness of a sort of swampy nature.

54:19So, and I go on to really harp on the fact

54:24in the translation, really try to draw out the fact

54:28that this isn't creation out of nothing.

54:29But I was hoping that by least picking Meyer and Merck

54:32I could push back a little bit against the formless

54:34and void, the wasteland, the nothingness idea.

54:37- Now this account of creation has pretty close ties

54:41with other ancient Southwest Asian

54:43and even Egyptian concepts of kind of land emerging

54:47from the chaotic waters of creation.

54:50Are you a proponents of the idea that Genesis 1

54:54is kind of a domestication of something

54:56along the lines of the Anuma Alisha's cows comp for

55:00or do you think that we're further removed from that,

55:03that it's not an adaptation of that's earlier myth?

55:08- Yeah, so I think, I think there are parts of P

55:12that are very much sort of an adaptation

55:14of Mesopotamian myths.

55:16I don't really see the connection with Genesis 1

55:20and Anuma Alish particularly strongly.

55:22I think in broad conceptual terms, it's there.

55:27I guess if you want to compare the phrase

55:29Anuma Alish tuber, sheet bura maybe,

55:32but even then it's a little, it's not quite.

55:35So, for me, the idea that there is a separation

55:41of waters and creation comes out of waters

55:45is very, very broad and very general.

55:49And I'm not necessarily a proponent

55:52of Genesis 1 is taking us directly from Anuma Alish

55:56so much as the idea of creation out of a watery mess

56:01is something that is in the lore of the area.

56:06- Kind of drawn from a shared matrix

56:08without necessarily being directly.

56:10- Exactly, I would talk differently

56:12about the flood story in Acha houses,

56:14but at least in terms of Anuma Alish, not so much.

56:17- Okay, so somewhat similar to David Sumoras

56:20taken in creation and chaos.

56:23- Yeah.

56:24- Okay, very cool.

56:25Well, and that actually ties into I think that we have,

56:30well, obviously we have our one creation account

56:33in Genesis 1.

56:34We have another creation account in Genesis 2 and 3,

56:37which is the work of another source.

56:39And then we also, I and many scholars have argued

56:43have at least one more creation account

56:46or at least vestiges of one more creation accounts

56:49in the scattered around Isaiah and Psalms and Job

56:54and elsewhere.

56:55And I'm going to be teaching an online class

56:57on that on September 20th.

56:58So anyone interested in hearing my own take

57:02on what's going on across these three different

57:04creation accounts is welcome to check out the,

57:11we'll put a link in the in the description too.

57:13- Solid plug, Dan.

57:15- Solid plug.

57:17- We were at a podcast in conference

57:19and every time someone came up to who recognized me

57:23came up to say hi, Dan would lean in and say,

57:25did you know he has a podcast?

57:27And they would all say, no, I did end.

57:29And so I'm trying to become a better business person

57:34at least trying to--

57:35- A cross promoter.

57:36- A cross promoter, yeah.

57:38- There you go.

57:38- Is that the jargon?

57:40- So I'm sorry to step all over your interview

57:42with that bit of self-promotion, Leanne, but--

57:46- I'm very glad to have been able to tee that up for you.

57:49- That's right.

57:50But Leanne, before we sign out,

57:52I want you to plug whatever you have to plug.

57:54Talk to us about your book.

57:56Tell us where we can get it.

57:57Talk to us about anything else you want us to know

57:59about in your work.

58:00- Yeah, sure.

58:02So yeah, this book is published by the University

58:05of California Press, they're--

58:09- They're the title of it one more time.

58:10- Oh, sure.

58:11The consuming fire, the complete priestly source

58:15from creation to the Promised Land,

58:17a bit of an audacious title.

58:18And you'll see I qualify that in the introduction

58:23from the neo-documentarian perspective anyway.

58:26But yeah, so this is, it's available

58:27from the University of California Press.

58:29It was incredibly important to me that it was affordable.

58:31So I think the book before any applicable discounts

58:35is like $19 or something like that.

58:37- $19.95 is the retail price.

58:39- There we go.

58:40And I have a discount code that I can email

58:43if you wanna include it with this,

58:45that I think it's either 30 or 40% off,

58:47brings it down to around $13.

58:48- Yeah, they are.

58:50- So there's that.

58:52The only other thing I will plug is that I am

58:55in the very final stages of finishing

58:57the next edition of this, which should be coming out sometime

59:01in probably later 2024, which is everything that's in here,

59:05but also the Hebrew text.

59:07- But don't let that stop you from buying

59:08the current version.

59:09And then you gotta go and buy the next version after.

59:12(laughing)

59:13- Well, the Hebrew version, the version that has that,

59:16so just to be clear, I'm not translating the introduction

59:19or the notes into modern Hebrew.

59:20This is the typical Hebrew text that I translated.

59:23And in large part, this is not something

59:25that the University of California Press usually does

59:27because this is a world literature and translation series.

59:30But because this is a text that is hypothetically

59:32reconstructed, obviously using scholarly methods,

59:36but I think sentence one is,

59:37why am I not just making things up?

59:39(laughing)

59:40I'm gonna talk about the method.

59:41That this isn't a text that's available in Hebrew.

59:45So nobody can really question my translation

59:49or quibble with choices I've made

59:51because you don't have access to the text that I translated

59:53'cause you don't know which words I kept in and out.

59:55And so it was very important to me

59:58to have that transparency, to say,

60:00look, I have this text that I translated.

60:04I wanna make it available to scholars,

60:06to students who know Hebrew,

60:08to those in the broader community

60:10who can read biblical Hebrew,

60:12so that they can see too,

60:13so they can argue with me about the translation,

60:16argue with me about choices.

60:18This was not meant to be the definitive statement.

60:20So when I say it's an audacious title

60:21to say the complete priestly source,

60:23I wanted this to start a conversation.

60:25I wanted to make the knowledge that was in my

60:29and maybe 19 other people's heads accessible to everyone else.

60:32And I hope people disagree with me.

60:34I hope people argue.

60:36I hope this is the start of a broader conversation

60:40about what this source can be.

60:41I absolutely love this text.

60:44I fell in love with it in 2009 and I'm still not done with it.

60:49So I just want other people to see what I love about it

60:53and to have a chance to tell me that I'm wrong about it.

60:56So the Hebrew will be coming out sometime in 2024

60:59once I manage to catch all the errors and the proofs

61:02with the help of a wonderful copy editor.

61:04- So this is really an opening volley

61:06and what will hopefully turn into a longer discussion.

61:08And correct me if I'm wrong,

61:11but Seth Sanders is also using your text

61:14for a digital online version of the priestly source

61:18that will be, do you are-

61:20- I know Seth has a digital open access online priestly source.

61:24I didn't realize he was using my text.

61:25That's amazing if he-

61:26- I don't, well, I don't wanna get him in any kind of copyright trouble.

61:31Because I-

61:32- If he chooses to do that, I'm very honored by it.

61:35I don't know.

61:36- I don't wanna be misrepresenting Seth either.

61:38He is in some way, shape or form

61:41referring to your text in an outline of the priestly source

61:46for his open access digital version

61:49that is also annotated.

61:51- Yeah, at least right now, his is English only.

61:55I think I don't know if he has plans to put the Hebrew up.

61:58But yeah, he put that out.

61:59That was out, it's been out for about a year, I think.

62:02And it's a great resource for anyone who doesn't wanna buy the book,

62:06who wants to compare, 'cause I think some of his source divisions

62:09are a little bit different than mine.

62:11So that's what I think about arguing, about having discussions.

62:15- So it might be it was,

62:18he was originally basing his off of yours,

62:21but fiddling with it here and there.

62:24- Or he had what I looked at it a year ago,

62:26he had based it off something else,

62:27then my book came out, maybe he changed something,

62:29maybe he didn't, I haven't looked at it since.

62:31- Okay, well you should still go ahead,

62:34and this is a very affordable book,

62:35and the introduction and the translators note

62:40is worth the price of admission,

62:41just because I think there are important principles in there

62:44that a lot of folks who are not among the 19 other people

62:48in the world who really have a firm grasp on these data,

62:51I think that can help a lot of folks orient themselves

62:54to understanding what's going on with penitucal criticism,

62:58at least as it pertains to the priestly source,

63:02P, perhaps the most important source in the penituc,

63:07and I'm trying not to alliterate so much with the P sounds.

63:12(laughing)

63:14- Well, thank you so much, Liam, for your time,

63:16we really appreciate it, appreciate your expertise,

63:18and really appreciate you publishing this book

63:22that I think will be very helpful.

63:24Dan, did you have something to add?

63:26- Just that anyone who would like to write into us

63:30can do so by writing into contact at dataoverdogmapod.com.

63:35If you would like to support this show

63:38and all of its goals, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma

63:43and kick a couple bucks our way.

63:46- Leanne, thank you so much for joining us,

63:48we really appreciate having you on.

63:50- Thank you for having me, this was a blast.

63:52- Excellent, bye everybody, take care.

63:56- Bye.

63:57(upbeat music)