In the Beginning

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

Dave’s not here, man. Hey, everybody.

Hi, friends, and welcome to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we bring you.

The latest in biblical scholarship and do.

Our best to combat the spread of misinformation. With me is Dr. Dan McClellan, biblical scholar and TikTok star. Hi. Hi, Dan. And I’m non-scholar and TikTok nobody, Dan Beecher. Well, Dan, here we are.

Here we are.

It is our, it is our first episode. Congratulations and congratulations to you and congratulations to all of the listeners and viewers watching us on YouTube and wherever.

We’re very happy for you.

Yes, indeed. So coming up on the show today, we’re going to do, we’re, we’re going to discuss Genesis. We’re going to dive right into the very front end of the Bible. And, and Dan, you’re going to introduce us to, to the holy name, to the deity, the name of the God of the Bible. Is that right?

Yeah. Our second segment, we’re going to talk about, well, we’re going to call it What Does That Mean? And we’re going to talk about different principles, different ideas within biblical scholarship that are in circulation right now. So I’m going to talk about the divine name.

Let’s start, though, with our segment, Chapter and Verse. We’re going to dive into the very part of the very first book of the Bible, which is Genesis. And, and the way we’re working this, I, I decided that I would dive in, I would read the first. I, I think we’re going to do the first three chapters of Genesis and 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.

All right, let’s give it.

And the first, the first thing we should do is discuss is sort of situate this within the Bible like we, what do we have here? We’ve got a story, well, possibly multiple stories of the creation. Where does this come from?

So 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. And, and the second one runs from the second half of Genesis 2:4 through to the end of chapter three. And that second one, most scholars would say, is probably the earlier one. And this is a story with a very anthropomorphic deity that makes noise as they walk through the Garden of Eden. This is a deity that creates manually by manipulating the soil. This is a deity that interacts directly with their creation. And this is also a deity who seems to be trying to kind of recalibrate or fix their creation as they go on. And what many scholars believe is centuries later, the priestly authors, so 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, with important leaders within Israel.

They 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. And this was probably written when Israel was in exile. And so in the absence of the temple. And we see an account that envisions a more transcendent deity. They 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. And they’re kind of combating, responding to those creation accounts from Babylon while also updating what’s going on in the earlier creation account.McClellan: So 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. They create the human, then they go, “Needs something else.” So we’re going to create some animals.

No, that’s not quite right. It needs something else. And then we create the woman. Genesis 1 , everything is created, and God saw that it was good. So it’s all right, it’s all correct right from the beginning. And we also have the account divided into multiple days of creation rather than just one single creative period. We’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. But 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.” So 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. So 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.

So what you’re claiming is that neither of these accounts was written contemporaneously with the actual creation of the earth.

It seems unlikely.

Okay. Let’s start. Let’s start in the beginning with the phrase “in the beginning,” because I know that you have an issue with that.

Yeah. So that’s the… that’s a traditional translation of Genesis 1:1 .

In the Hebrew… in my… In my King James, that’s how it says. That’s what 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 Bereshit, which occurs about four or five or six other times in the Hebrew Bible. And it never means “in the beginning.” It 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. And this is how Hebrew creates what is called a genitive relationship, X of Y. So we have that helper word “of” in English to indicate that. And in Hebrew, you put two words together and then you pull the accent off of the first word and moved it to the second. And 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.

Okay.

So the opening word there seems to be saying, “In the beginning of God’s 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 obtained. And so more colloquially in English, and the way you will find in many more scholarly modern translations of Genesis 1:1 , it says, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth.” And then verses 2 and 3 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, and the spirit of God—or this divine spirit—moved over the depths or over the waters.

Yeah, 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, right? And this. But it is chaotic in whatever way that. Whatever that means. And 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. There’s already stuff there like that’s. That’s what we can. What we can know. So, yes, it can’t be the very, very beginning of all creation because boom, we’ve. 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. 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 raqia, which comes from a verb that means to hammer out. And so the. 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. But 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. Now, in the Babylonian account, upon which Genesis 1 is likely to some degree based and to which it is responding, these chaotic waters are actually a chaos deity known as Tiamat.

And they engage in battle with this deity, Marduk. And 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.

That’s fascinating. And. But it’s clear that, like, the idea of the sky is that. And it’s. 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.

Right?

And I guess maybe that’s what comes when it rains. It somehow seeps through or whatever. That’s interesting. That’s fascinating.

And then. And that’s when we get to the flood account. The windows of heaven open and that.

Allows all of that above water. Okay. Okay, there we go. Then some things are starting to fall into place. I like that. Okay, 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. But I guess 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. So we’ve got plants and dry land and jump in here if there’s anything interesting that I’m. That I’m gliding over, because I don’t know.

Well, one. One interesting thing I could comment on here is our first three days of creation, what’s going on is things are being separated, and that process of separation is creating the environment. And then the next three days of creation are going to fill those environments with the entities that inhabit them now. So day one was the separation of light and dark.paration of light and dark. And you’re going to see in the corresponding day four, the creation of the inhabitants of the light and the dark, the sun, the stars, the planets. Day 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 in the seas and the birds of the skies. And. And then day three, which, 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, and those happen to include the fowl.

Well, they. They fly around through the skies.

Oh, that’s right. The skies are water.

Right.

Okay.

And then day three corresponds to day six, where we have the inhabitants of the dry lands and everything else is. Is filled in. So 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. This was intended to reflect kind of the order and the symmetry of creation. Everything is good. It corresponds. It is symmetrical.

It’s got a poetry to it.

Exactly.

It’s got. And, and. And I think that. Yeah, I think that that poetic sense, it would make sense that this was. That this was symbolism, that this wasn’t meant to be literal stuff. Now, now there’s a really interesting thing towards the end of Genesis 1 , 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 here or what? What is this us that’s happening?

So 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, that creation is something that is overseen and supervised by this deliberative body of deities. And they make the plans for it. They see that everything is executed correctly. Now, 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. So the “let us make man” plan is. 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.

Right. All right. And then day seven everybody’s tired, so we all take a nap. So that’s Genesis 1 basically in a nutshell. Although as you point out, Genesis 2 , the first four-ish verses feel like they’re actually belonging back to Genesis 1 .

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, God creates the earth and the heavens and so the order is, 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. But this, this is the exact same way of beginning the account that we see in Genesis 1 , 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. So I would suggest that Genesis 1 is patterned after organizationally the beginning of the creation account in Genesis 2 only.is 2:4b. Whereas Genesis 2 says, “In the day that God created the earth and the heavens,” Genesis 1 ’s got six days of creation.

So they were probably like, “We can’t, we can’t say ‘day.’ What are we going to say?” What are we going to say? Let’s just say “Bereshit.” And so they went with “Bereshit bara,” “In the beginning of the creation of,” or “God’s creating the heavens and the earth.” So it’s kind of a formulaic way of doing the same thing that Genesis 2 :4b is doing.

Yeah. After verse four, once we’ve started the Genesis 2 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. Interesting. A different relationship with water in this one.

Right.

It seems like earth and heavens—there’s no mention of water being above the heavens or the heavens having any relationship to water. And then King James has a “mist arising” and NRSV has a “stream rising up” from the earth.

Yeah.

Anyway, water comes, but it comes from the earth in both of those. I’m, you know, I’m not going to look—it’s your job to know all of the translations. But it does seem like the water doesn’t come from the heavens at first, it comes from the earth. Is that correct?

Yeah. 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 the deity here is extracting the waters from the subterranean realms in order to kind of fertilize the earth and allow everything to sprout and to grow. So there’s a sense in which it’s appealing to this idea of the deity as well, to the divine profile of the storm deity—the deity who has sovereignty over the thunder, the lightning, the rain, but also the subterranean realms. And 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 Yahwist 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. But 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.

Interesting. Okay, then. Now we finally get to humans and God gathers up some dust. He’s the divine sculptor.

He is.

He fashions a dude and breathes the breath of life into his dust-man. Man.

Yeah. Now this is very interesting because this is sounding an awful lot like the creation of a divine image, which frequently were made with clay. And that’s what combining dust and water is going to get you—it’s going to get you clay. And there was a ritual—so we have variations on this ritual whereby the divine image is enlivened. And 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.” And 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 of the breath of life, which is…s…

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. And I, I 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 or at least…

Don’t go worship things made of… of wood and stone. And, and this pops up in some later Jewish literature, for instance, the idea of the fall of Satan. One of the stories, 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?” Because 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. And so this idea of humanity as the image of God, in the sense of a divine image, an idol, is something that we find popping up here and there in ancient Judaism.

Well, 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. He takes another step in a little bit.

Yep.

But as we move on through the… 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… that are called out: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Are those… are those new to this story? Are they unique to this story? Do they come… do those trees come up in imagery in… in other places? Do we know? Do we know?

So the idea of a tree of life is something that is closely associated with worship and temples in… in other societies. Trees were symbols of life because a tree needed water to grow. And, you know, when they’re… when their foliage is out, they are indications that there are resources to sustain life somewhere nearby. And so frequently, trees were associated with worship. And you have, in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, images of people sustaining themselves off of trees. And you even have an interesting illustration in, in some Egyptian texts of trees covered in breasts, and they basically breastfeed to sustain life and growth and things like that. So the idea of a tree of life is something that is… is pretty widespread and can be found in a number of different societies. The idea of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a little distinct, but the pursuit of knowledge is something that all societies consider important.

And 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. And 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… That’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 did, but we’re just… kind of customizing it. We’re just kind of making it our own in this story.

Yeah. And as you point out, Dan, this man who does not receive a name yet is to tend to this garden.s to tend to this garden. He can eat from every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And Adonai is very clear that on the day that he eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he will die on that day. That day he will die.

Yeah. And that’s a… That’s a pretty odd kind of specification. On the very day.

Yeah.

You eat of it, you will die.

Yeah. Especially odd considering… And I’m… I’m assuming pretty much everyone who’s listening to this knows that he ends up eating the fruit and does not end up…

Dying, at 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. Whereas the thing that the serpent said in chapter three—the serpent says two things. And we’ll get to that in a moment. But 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. Now it’s a little squishy, it’s a little fuzzy, but… But it does raise some interesting questions on what the authors are trying to do with the text.

Yeah, I’m just gonna push through the rest of this creation story. I’ll brush past the fact that the river that flows out of Eden forks into four. I assume that it’s just sort of trying to come up with an origin story for these different geographical areas and different known rivers. So the man is lonely. Adonai decides that the man needs an ezer kenegdo or a… …helper. A helper.

Yeah.

Makes a bunch of animals.

Yeah. Yeah. So interestingly, the phrase here that we translate “help meet,” that comes from the King James Version. It’s two words in Hebrew, ezer kenegdo, and it’s a helper that corresponds to him. And so… …and… …and the ezer there does not necessarily mean somebody subordinate. The same word is used as a reference to Adonai in multiple different places. And so it’s someone who’s helping out. And here this helper is someone who corresponds to the man.

And the first set of helpers that are attempted…

Yeah.

…are critters. We just… We just… We just put a bunch of critters down there. The man has to name them all. Apparently that doesn’t work out; he’s still lonely. So Adonai creates this other helper. Now, is it the same word? Is this ezer kenegdo word the same word in reference to the animals as it is in reference to the woman? The woman?

Yeah. I think the idea is that the animals were a failed attempt to achieve this ezer kenegdo. And… …and there are some folks who argue that, you know, this was about sexual compatibility. 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. have argued. But yeah, the idea is, “Oh, that didn’t work.” Okay, we’re going to try again to achieve this this corresponding helper.

Right. But God doesn’t use dust again. He yoinks a rib out of the man. He calls in the divine anesthesiologist and makes him go to sleep, then takes a rib and makes woman. The man is happy, satisfied. This is. “This at last is bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called woman, for out of man this one was taken.” I don’t. I’m. I’m assuming that there’s a reference to that. That there’s a a Hebrew thing that I don’t understand about why woman is is related to “out of man.” But.

Well, we. The. The Hebrew word for man is ish, and then for woman is isha. And it it seems like they may not actually be etymologically related, but.

Oh, interesting.

So in a sense, it’s probably a bit of a folk etymology for why the two words are related.

Interesting. And. And then we close off with the fact that they’re naked and totally okay with that.

Yep.

So, okay, great. Thanks for. Thanks for that little inclusion there. And then we move on to Genesis 3 . And this may be. You know, I’m pushing on my time here, but this is fascinating stuff. We 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 it seems to just be one of the wild critters right in the garden.

Yeah, the. The 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.

Oh, 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, and 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 immortality. And at the last second, he’s underwater trying to get it, and a snake snatches it from him. And there are other associations as well, and even today, medical associations. The snake wrapped around the staff is a symbol of of healing. And we find that in a number of other societies. And so. And we even see it in the Book of Numbers with the symbol Nehushtan, which was the bronze serpent that Moses created in order to facilitate healing of everybody who was bitten by serpents. So the symbolism of this serpent, with the association of the serpent with evil, is something that develops much later. Here, it is a symbol of perhaps craftiness, shrewdness, cleverness, something like that.

So definitely not any Satan figure, which had not even developed yet.

And 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. He was, he may have had legs, we don’t know.

You got me. Yeah. There. There are illustrations of snakes with legs in some Egyptian texts.ptian texts.

Oh, interesting.

And one of the, one of the. The curse on the serpent is that it will crawl around on his belly.

That’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. The woman said, we. We may eat of the fruit. I’m. What? What? I’m in the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition.

Okay.

I think we have to call out our editions if we’re. When we’re reading, so. 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. And 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. That’s an interesting thing. I, 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’s. It seems high on their list.

Well, yeah, and this is something I talk about in my book, Adonai’s 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. So if 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. We 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 merism, which is a fancy word for naming 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.

Okay.

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. And 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. And 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, keep him away from there. We don’t want that.

Yeah, 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.

Well, it hasn’t been mentioned yet.

Well, we’re good. Yeah, we’re getting there. I mean, it was mentioned briefly in, in, in chapter two. Right. I think it was.

Does it talk about two trees? I thought it.

I think it talks about the tree of life and, and the tree.250] Dan Beecher: Anyway, so eventually Eve decides, okay, this serpent seems on the level, and I’m going to eat the fruit. She eats the fruit, doesn’t die, gives some to her husband, who also doesn’t die. But they suddenly know that they’re naked.

Yeah.

Which means that the knowledge has happened and somehow that nudity is inherently bad and they’ve figured that out.

Yeah. And this is the loss of innocence. 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 this preposition, “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.

Right.

For allowing Eve, or just standing by and not doing anything while Eve did what they both knew they were not supposed to do. So there’s some oddities in the way this has been translated. And also the way Eve repeats the prohibition to the serpent is distinct from the way it was told to Adam. And we never hear about God telling Eve about the story. So people wonder, did Adam tell her? Did God? Did she have some separate discussion with 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 this story that suggest maybe we’re not getting the whole story. Maybe we’ve got a whittled down Reader’s Digest version of this story. Or, or maybe this was just a way to tell it. And, you know, there was a lot of stuff that was just in the air. You just had to know the background in order to make sense of the story.

Yeah, indeed. All right, well, then 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 they kind of sheepishly go, “We’re not here. Come back another time.” To which God… “God’s not here, man.” To which God says, “Have you been eating the fruit? Did you eat the fruit?” Yeah. Yeah. Adam literally says, “We’re hiding because we’re naked.”

Right.

And God says, “Who told you you were naked? How did you figure that out? Did you eat that fruit?” Yeah, “We ate the fruit. We ate the fruit. The 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? What 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, wants them to tell the truth like we do with our kids. ‘Are you the one who wrote on the wall?’” kind of stuff.

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.ut. And I think verse 22 is an indication of that. We have in verse 5, 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 knowing good and evil, because that word for knowing there is a participle that’s plural.

Oh, 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. And so becoming like one of us suggests that the serpent’s statement, you will be like the gods was perfectly accurate. This wasn’t a lie. This came true. And God is kind of surprised by this and says, oh, crap, we need to lock that door or else they’re going to. And 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. And for some reason in this story, that’s the last thing God wants.

Yeah, 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 to slither on the ground. Woman has to have painful childbirth, and everybody’s kicked out of the garden. So. And then the garden is guarded by a dude with a flaming sword. A cherubim. What’s a cherubim?

So cherubim is a. A word that is plural and, 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. Basically, it was. It was like a. A lion with. 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, and 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 the Garden of Eden. And 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.

Right. 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.

Now, now you’re making me think of The NeverEnding Story and trying to get past the oracles.

That’s right, that’s right. All right, well that, I think that’s a good start. We’re, we’re in it. We’ve waded into one of the forks of the river and we’ve started. So thanks, Dan. Let’s move on to our next segment.

Hey 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 consensuses, some of the background, some 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. And so today I want to talk about the divine name Adonai. Now, as a bit of 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. I will not 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.

So 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 Yod He Vav He, which is presented as the personal name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. Now.

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?

In 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. But 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. So if you go look at a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, you’ll see the vowels in there, but yes, Yod He Vav He are the consonants of the divine name. And the vowels were not written. And it. We’re 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. But where does the divine name come from? What does it mean? And what are the origins of the deity who possesses that name? The 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 Mesha inscription, the Tel Dan inscription, and the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III. And these are actually not from Israelite authors. The Mesha inscription was written by King Mesha, a Moabite. The Tel Dan inscription was written by an Aramean ruler. And the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III is a product of an Assyrian ruler. An Assyrian ruler. And the Mesha 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 2 Kings . And they talk about, or Mesha boasts about carting off the vessels of Adonai and dragging them before his deity, his patron deity in Moab.

And then we have discussion of some of the kings of Israel and specifically of the Omride 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, but what we do have are references to Israelite or Judahite kings who have names that have Yahwistic theophoric elements. So a theophoric element 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. So Dan, you and I, I assume your full name is Daniel. It is just like me, and that is Daniel. In Hebrew it means God is my judge. And the last two letters, E-L, are the Hebrew word for God. God. So that would be the theophoric element. And so the kings that are referred to in the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III and the Tel Dan inscription have Yahwistic 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. So 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. We have from around the year 1208 BCE, an inscription from Egypt that was commissioned by a king named Merneptah 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, not 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 and People’s Judea Front.

The People’s Front of Judea, the People’s Judean Front.

Right. We’re not splitters over here. And this name Israel probably means something like El contends or may El contend. And that word El 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. This is the well-known patriarchal high deity. And so Israel seems to be dedicated to a patron deity, El, who is a pretty widespread leading deity of this whole region. It’s not evidently Adonai.

Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, it’s right there in the name Israel. That’s interesting.

Yeah, yeah. And there are ways to, if you want to try to renegotiate that, there are ways to, to get around that and suggest, oh, that the deity was known by both names. Right. But somewhere between 1208 BCE ish and around 850 to 800 BCE, it seems like a deity named Adonai arrived on the scene and acceded to rule over the Israelite pantheon. The name El 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. And 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. And 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 him, in Exodus 6:3 , I was known to the patriarchs, your fathers, as El Shaddai. Which is an El divine epithet, but by my name, Adonai, I was not known to them. And specifically lists Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But 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, they call out that name multiple times. And so it seems like whoever’s in, 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 adherent to Adonai. And so didn’t really like the idea of Adonai as the patron deity and preferred El Shaddai. 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 so it’s a unified narrative.

And one of the indications that maybe that’s accurate, that the 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. As 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 . And so all the, the presence of the Tetragrammaton, the divine name in Genesis is probably a secondary addition to the literature. probably, it probably occurred very, very early on, but it seems like it was added secondarily.

Interesting. 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, it spices it up, it makes it make sense or something like that.

Well, originally the stories from Genesis probably circulated as separate stories. You probably had traditions regarding Jacob, traditions regarding Esau, regarding Joseph, traditions regarding Abraham. And 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, yes, 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. And 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 El. And that’s Deuteronomy 32 , 8 and 9, which in most traditional translations of the Bible it says that the Most High divided up, up the nations according to the number of the children of Israel is what many translations say, but we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, that originally it said children of God, Bene Elohim.

And so it seems that this Most High Elyon, a title that is applied primarily to El within the Hebrew Bible, that that deity seems to have allocated the nations to their children. And it says in verse nine and Adonai’s portion was Jacob. Israel was the lot of his inheritance, which would seem to group Adonai with the Bene Elohim, the children of God, and that Elyon was Adonai’s father.

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

Yeah. And we, and we have in the Ugaritic literature. So Ugarit was a city that was destroyed around 1200 BCE it was like, located in Syria. But we’ve discovered almost a thousand texts written in their language which is closely related to Hebrew. And they have El as this patriarchal high deity. And they have the 70 children of El and Athirat or Asherah. And then one of them, one of the main figures among the children of El is a storm deity named Baal. And 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. A 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, through 3.

But Adonai seems to be this youthful warrior who is associated with violent weather, with low hanging, thick, thunderous clouds, with flashes of lightning. But 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 because, say I, when.

You deep, you know, when you get further into the, into the book, you, you see Baal as this. He’s this demonized character. He’s this. And, and I, you know, as someone who watches, I see a lot of videos of, of modern day pastors screaming about how Baal is, is, is this evil thing that’s, that’s working against us even today. Or I, you know, or worshipers of Baal or something like that. Baal or something like that. And so, so the, the fact that they could be kind of the same guy is fascinating.

Yeah, it’s, 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. And 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. Adonai is able to do it. And so the people cry out, Adonai hu ha Elohim? Adonai hu ha Elohim? He 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. And 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 in 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, so 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 Shasu, and this means nomads, but they’re using it like a name, like a, a way to kind of dismiss these people, the vagabonds, basically. And on these lists we have the land of Shasu of X and the land of Shasu of Y. And this is basically saying the Shasu land that goes by this name and the Shasu land that goes by this name. And one of them on there is, 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. But 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. Like an aleph. And 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, Shasu land, Adonai. And 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 two, the deity Adonai. Because there’s. The scholarly consensus is that the divine name is probably based in some way on this verbal root that means to be. And 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 root. And so rather than to be, it is to cause to be or to create. And so he argued that this was originated in this cultic title, the Lord Tzevaot, or we know this as the Lord of hosts. But according to this theory, it would be the one who creates hosts.

And 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 the Lord Elohim, or according to this theory, the 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. Now, this complicates things because there’s not really a good reason to name this land the One who is. And so if the divine name originates in the name of a land, then it probably didn’t originate in any verb at all.that 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. And 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.

But at some point they had to accede 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. And 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. So my personal opinion is that someone who is 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 not by keeping the deity separate, not by saying Adonai killed El or took El’s place, but just by merging the two and saying Adonai is El.

And that way we get to, 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. Adonai is God, El is Adonai. And so most likely in the early history of Israel, after Adonai comes into the pantheon, someone begins a campaign of conflation to identify Adonai with El, and 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.

And that’s a, that’s an interesting point because in the beginning of the Bible everybody kind of believes in a lot of different gods. Like monotheism is like, 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. And, and eventually it kind of does whittle down to we really only believe in the one God. Would you say that’s true?

I, 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—and 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 with 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, there’s only one God. All the other ones, meh, 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. You can have them, we don’t need them.

Fair enough.

And, and 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 Baal’s divine profile is we have some poetry in the Hebrew Bible where it seems an awful lot like the authors just took poetry that was written in praise of Baal and just wrote Adonai’s name in instead. And there are two instances of these. One is a little less explicit, and one I think is pretty darn explicit. The less explicit one is Psalms 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. And 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 Baal. And so this was likely some poetry praising Baal as the storm deity that was appropriated. And somebody went in and erased Baal’s name and wrote Adonai instead. And then another one where we actually have the smoking gun, so to speak, is Isaiah 27:1 , where we have this prophecy that Adonai will defeat Leviathan, this kind of mythological dragon slash serpent. And it says that Adonai will defeat the wriggling serpent, will defeat the twisting serpent, the dragon that lives in the sea. And these are— this is interesting poetry, but among those Ugaritic texts that I referenced earlier, there’s a discussion of Baal as the one who beat Lotan. And this is the Ugaritic counterpart to the name Leviathan.

And the text says, Baal defeated the wriggling serpent, Baal defeated the twisting serpent, Baal defeated the dragon with seven heads. And this comes from 500 years before Isaiah.

Wow.

But the— it is written in another language, but the words are directly cognate. And so very clearly, whoever wrote Isaiah 27:1 was borrowing from, at some point, somehow this literature, this poetry had filtered down to something in Hebrew. And they borrowed from this literature that originally was praise of Baal. 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 weather. 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. And then 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.

That is fascinating. 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. Well, 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.

Bye, everybody.