The Dave Ramsey Takedown

We’ve got a fever. And the only prescription is to sell everything that you own and give the money to the poor.

Yeah, exactly.

Cowbell. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

It’s a good day for, for combating misinformation and we’ve got some, some combating to do.

And a worthy opponent at that.

Also a good day for coordinating with your typewriter. Your shirt seems to have some pink in it, which is, you know, so.

For the, for those listening at home, that won’t make a lot of sense, but if you’re watching us on the YouTube, yes, I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve got like a little bit of pink in my shirt. I got a pink typewriter behind me. Everything’s, everything’s coming up roses.

And I’m just, I’m just wearing Wolverine as normal.

So as per usual.

Big fan of roses, though. Definitely. Yeah. Logan, all about the roses. Yeah. We’re going to be combating some misinformation being spread by a very high profile individual.

Yeah, it’s, it’s one Mr. Dave Ramsey. We’re gonna, we’re going, we’re coming.

I was trying to tease a little bit, tease it out, have him wondering, well, who is it? Dan’s and.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, fine.

Fine. You’re the expert. Okay. So I.

Yes, on this show, I’m definitely the expert. So our first segment is going to be a Taking Issue because we are taking issue with Mr. Ramsey. And then we’re gonna do a What Is It? And we’re gonna be talking about, what are we talking about? The Deuteronomical.

I think Deuteronomic is the correct-Deuteronomian phenomenon.

Phenomena. We probably can’t sing that. Yeah, well, Deuteronomistic history.

Yeah. Okay.

And the Deuteronomist, and the Deuteronomistic school, and even a little bit about Deuteronomy.

Okay. So, yeah, none of it has anything to do with The Dude, though, unfortunately. So you Lebowskiites can.

We’re, we’re not into, we’re not into the whole brevity thing, so.

That’s true. No, we’ll save that for TikTok.

All right, well, hey, let’s, let’s launch in with Taking Issue and this week, the issue we are taking is with one Mr. Dave Ramsey, who, who was made to feel quite, I’m just going to say he, he seems pretty defensive.

He was asked a question on his show. For those of you who don’t know, Dave Ramsey is a financial guru. This is like, he, he, he’s a personal finance guy. He, his whole deal is that he’ll teach you how to get out of debt and get rich. And I, my personal opinion of his approach is that it is not very realistic or effective, but that’s neither here nor there because the thing that makes him salient to our podcast is that he brands himself as the Christian personal finance guy.

And that’s weird. That’s a weird thing to do.

Well, I mean, there are others. He’s not the only one who is like, Jesus will help you get wealthy. Yeah, mainly he’s going to help me get wealthy.

Though it does seem like everyone, every time someone says, Jesus will help you get wealthy, they’re the ones that seem, whose bank accounts seem to grow from it. But yes, yes, that’s neither here nor there in terms of Dave Ramsey.

So here’s the deal. He’s got a show. He’s probably got multiple shows. And on a recent episode he was asked about some. I’ll just read the question and then we can sort of go over.

What was, what, what, how he answered. So the question was, how is it considered ethical for people to own so many houses? I was wondering how, as a Christian, this isn’t seen as greed. Don’t you know that buying up all these homes is what’s causing the housing shortage? Now, for those of you who aren’t in the United States of America, I don’t, I’m guessing this is happening all over the world, but there are some real problems happening in the housing sector here in, in the US. It’s, it’s getting really dicey out there.

There are, there are a lot more houses that get purchased by investors, real estate investors, than by people who are going to live in those houses than has been the case in the past. And I think someone, I saw another video where somebody said there are like almost 5—there’s a shortage of almost 5 million homes in the US and there are more than 5 million homes that are owned by investors, folks who, who own multiple different properties. What is the, what is the one that they kept bringing up? BlackRock? Blackstone?

Blackstone, yeah.

Blackstone, yeah. Is an example of that.

But they’re a hedge fund. It’s a. Yeah, so, so this is just an investment group that is finding ways to make money and frankly, housing, it’s fine, you know, it’s, it’s fine to make a profit off of housing. That’s not a problem. But when that, when your model is to buy enough housing to be strong enough, you know, some of these companies are so strong that they literally like, can they have the muscle to drive up all the prices of the homes that they’ve purchased just so that they can then sell them for more or, or have high rental costs.

Yeah. And evidently, though, they’re not the main drivers of the problem. What’s funny about this video is, is Dave Ramsey was like, “That has nothing to do with the housing crisis.” And then with some back and forth with the, the, the other person on the show, he was like, “Okay, maybe it has something to do with the housing crisis, but not as much as those idiots on TikTok say.” And, and the other person’s like, “You’re on TikTok.” And he’s like, “And?”

But it is amazing because like, his first response, the question is obviously meant to be a theological one or, or an ethical one, but it’s, it’s framed in a Christian framework. And that is about greed. It’s about. So maybe let’s start with that. What, what do we know? What does the Bible tell us about, like, we’ve talked about Jesus saying that wealth, that wealth is bad.

Yeah, I’ll do you one better.

We actually have in the Bible criticism of people who buy up properties.

Oh, really?

Yeah. And this, this goes back to the prophetic critique. So I, we’ve talked about this before on the show. In the 8th century, you had these kings who had like 40 year reigns and there was a lot of, a lot of growth, economic growth, there was a lot of population growth. They were trading internationally. The northern kingdom of Israel was doing well. You had new cities popping up all over the place. The southern kingdom of Judah was doing well. They didn’t really have many cities. Mainly it was just Jerusalem was the main city. But you went from a subsistence society where, you know, you might have a handful of acres and you’re growing stuff and you’re mainly growing enough to keep your household alive and then have a little extra to take down to the farmer’s market on the weekend. And, and, and what you do is you diversify your crops so that, you know, if something happens and one crop goes, you know, goes south, it doesn’t totally devastate you.

Right?

And what happens when you start to get a lot more income and a lot more centralized control is, in the 8th century, it converted to what’s called a command economy, where the people who had the money and the people who were buying up the crops and controlling what was grown are telling you what to grow. And they’re saying, we, you know, and it was mainly olive oil, wine, things like that that are being shipped off, being sold internationally. And so your people who live in the big cities with all the money are directing what folks out in the fields are selling, and they don’t care about the diversification of the crops. And so it’s a lot more dicey. You’re a lot more vulnerable in a command economy. And also you’re gonna have to borrow money. And in the, in the subsistence economy, usually the population centers are smaller and you have survival loans that are, you know, meted out within a community.

And, you know, they might not charge interest. They might charge only a tiny bit of interest. They would say, you know, pay us back when you can.

But with the command, it’s just to get you by for the, for the six months until, until your next crop comes in and you’re able to sort of make things, make things happen for yourself.

In, in the command economy, you’re getting loans from the wealthy people in the city centers who could not care less what happens to you and demand to be paid back in bullion. You know, when the, when the crops are being harvested, when they’re the least valuable. Like, everything works for the wealthy folks and against the, the poor folks out in the field in a command economy. And this is what’s happening.

I’m glad we got rid of that system. That doesn’t sound like a good system at all.

And then if you forfeit or if you. Oh, shoot, I’m forgetting I’m not an economist, as everybody already knows. But if you don’t pay back your loan, they take over control of your property. And then guess what? You’re working your own land just to give everything to the person who now owns your land, right? You’ve become basically a serf. You’ve been enslaved to your own property. And that just allows land consolidation and debt consolidation on the part of the wealthy folks. And so this creates huge social inequities. And this is what’s going on in the 8th century. And you have the 8th century prophets coming out hard against this. And so in Isaiah chapter five, you’ve got. Well, and it starts in chapter one. And the prophetic critique is where they’re like, I hate your, your sacrifices and your offerings, and I do not delight in the blood of bulls and all this kind of stuff. And, and really the idea is you’re all grinding the faces of the poor and then you’re turning around and you’re going, look how pious I am at the, at the, the festivals and everything.

And that’s, and that’s the height of sin. But in Isaiah 5 , he says, Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until. Until there is room for no one and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land. The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing. Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitant. For 10 acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath, and a homer of seed shall yield an ephah. So basically, he’s threatening all the wealthy people who are out there engaged in this land consolidation, who are exploiting the economy, who are taking advantage of the justice system, who are doing all these things to make themselves wealthy. And this is.

Sure, he wasn’t talking about Florida, because this literally sounds exactly like Florida to me. Do you know how many homes are sitting vacant in Florida right now? I.

All I think about when I hear vacants is, is the wire.

It’s literally hundreds of thousands of homes.

That doesn’t surprise me. They’re probably, you know, multi million dollar homes too.

Yeah, or they were. Good luck buying or selling them now.

But this is the beating heart of the prophetic critique, because it is. Wealth is all being centralized among a minority of the elite, and it is leaving the poor and the orphan and the widow and the oppressed out to dry. And so that’s Isaiah and Micah and Amos and Hosea. They’re all just dragging the wealthy because they are doing precisely what Dave Ramsey is talking about. So even in the Hebrew Bible, we have direct condemnation of what Dave Ramsey is about to try to very pathetically defend.

Yeah, because here’s what he, what he comes back with. For he doesn’t answer, he doesn’t address the ethical question at all. To start with, what he, what he first tries to do is say, no, people buying multiple homes is not what’s driving the, the housing crisis. And then, you know, the. The woman that he’s talking to says, well, what about Blackstone, as you said? And he goes, oh, yeah, well, Blackstone kind of is. Yeah, that’s kind of bad. And then he makes this weird thing that. As though this somehow makes. It makes a real differentiation. He’s like, well, hedge funds don’t have a soul, which. Yeah, I guess. But, like, the guys that make the decisions there, do the people who profit off of them do the. Like. It’s. This thing isn’t operating as an autonomous unit. Hedge funds don’t, like, pop up out of the ocean fully formed and ready to make choices.

Yeah. They’re. They’re run by people who profit off of them.

And as I mentioned to you earlier, it sounds like he’s taking limited liability corporation a little too far. As if your moral culpability before God can be offloaded to your corporation. It’s not me who did this. It’s my LLC that did this. And that’s clearly not a sentient entity. And so the culpability just dissolves like a fart in the wind.

I can’t be responsible for any of this.

I like the idea of Dave Ramsey showing up to the pearly gates and showing his, like, articles of incorporation to St. Peter or whatever.

So here’s the deal. He then goes on to say—he says, you know, I own, I don’t know, 15, 20 houses and a bunch of commercial real estate, which the thought of, like, not even knowing how many houses you own…

And then being like, while the majority of the…

The upcoming generation will never own…

Right.

A single home. Yeah. And he’s like, I don’t know. I got some. I don’t know.

Well, and also, like, he’s talking about Blackstone like it’s this horrible thing. Dude, that’s you. That’s who you are if you own upwards of 20 houses. And come on, if he’s saying 15 to 20, he owns more like 30 or 40.

But, yeah, as well as commercial real estate, like, you’re literally no different than Blackstone at that point, except in scale.

And then he gets to the really juicy part, and I want to go ahead and read this.

Go for it.

And he says, “How is…"—somebody says, “How is that not greed?” And he says, “Because I don’t own anything, Greg. I’m a Christian, and that means God owns it, and I’m managing it for him. So I guess you’re calling God greedy.” And I’m reading word for word from a transcript of this video. He literally said that. Which is another—it’s another attempt to be like, well, the LLC owns it, not me.

Right.

I’m just.

Only this time it’s God LLC. It is the Lord Limited Liability Company. He. Yeah, yeah, the thought that, I mean, it’s such a dodge, right? It’s such an obvious dodge. Because very clearly, yeah, maybe he could claim that if he were giving all of the proceeds of all of these things to a charity. Yeah, maybe he could say that. Then he could claim, “You know what? I’m just managing this for God.” You know what I mean? Like, I can understand that being a claim if he’s not benefiting from the increase of this business venture. But…

Yeah. And certainly this sounds like this concept only exists when it is reified for the sake of defending his moral stance. Because I’m sure at no point whatsoever is he ever, you know, counting his sacks of cash that have dollar signs painted on them with the idea of “how am I going to serve God?”

Like, right.

God is not the one who is cashing the checks. God is not the one who’s jetting off to the Seychelles to enjoy being a steward of God’s property.

Right.

This is a defense that exists only for the sake of defense. This is… yeah. And good heavens, is that a pathetic attempt.

Even if your license plate says something Christian on it, if it’s on a Ferrari, that’s you. So there you go. Yeah, I think that it’s kind of astounding that he’s willing to say that—“Oh, I guess you’re calling God greedy now.” No, we’re talking to you, Dave. That’s who. Yeah.

And then he goes on to give a hard time to people who have bathrooms in their homes, right? Where he’s like, “If you make 30…”

This is another “look over there” sort of a dodge.

It’s whataboutism. Yeah, here it’s like, “If you make $36,000 a year, you’re in the richest 1% globally,” which is entirely false. I looked it up. It’s more like $175,000 a year to be in the top 1% globally.

Oh, really? Okay.

And if you’re talking about the top 1% in the U.S., it’s like 800-something thousand dollars a year. So not only is it not true, but it’s just pure whataboutism. You’re just trying to…

He’s making, he says if you’ve got three bathrooms, if you have more, you have more than most people in the world. Why are you not greedy? If you have two cars, you have two cars more than most people in the world. If you make $38,000 a year, you’re in the top 1% of income. How are you not greedy? And his point, and then he, and then he says another astounding thing which is amounts don’t create greed. Greed is a spirit, it’s not an amount.

I mean, okay, you, you can have greedy poor people. Yeah. And, and you can have selfless wealthy people. That’s a lot more rare. But, but yeah, the, this is another attempt to just dodge the fact that now if, if you’re always trying to get more, that’s, that’s what avarice is. That’s what greed is. You’re not happy with what you have. And I don’t think, I don’t think the biggest concern is this qualifies as greed. I think the biggest concern is this is unethical. If you hold yourself out to be a Christian. Whether it’s greedy or not, it’s unethical to be causing suffering on the part of others just so you can hoard more for yourself.

Yeah, I think that is the point. I, I do think that there are, and I don’t have it pulled up. There are, I mean, you know, one of the things that we talk about all the time on this show is the fact that the Bible can be used to bolster many different conflicting positions. And I think that there are some, some scripture that definitely, you know, definitely lean the other direction that it’s good to, to be wealthy and that, that wealth is sort of, it makes up for a positive thing. And you know, a lot of these scripture writers were writing in the times of kings who had wealth and they would have gotten in big trouble if they had written anything else.

Well, and a lot of, a lot of the Hebrew Bible, a lot of the wisdom literature, this is written by the social elites and they are, are there to promote their own, their own worldview and their own interests. So you know, the, the author of Proverbs is obviously, you know, doesn’t, doesn’t have a hard time with wealth when he’s like, ah, a virtuous woman who has a bunch of slaves and goes out and. And purchases fields in the marketplace and, and all this kind of stuff like, that’s. That’s a very wealthy person. The New Testament is written to serve the interests of minority communities and largely oppressed communities. Now, there’s the. There. The authors are not speaking on behalf of communities. They’re writing for literary purposes. But earliest Christianity was derided as a religion for women and slaves. These were the. The poor and the downtrodden, which is why in the New Testament, you don’t really have the same kind of rhetoric you have in Proverbs and, And in Samuel and Kings.

The New Testament, you have Jesus telling the rich young ruler, oh, if you want to inherit internal, eternal life, go sell everything you have and give all the money to the poor. Now, I don’t know how Dave Ramsey reconciles this with. I mean, what would he have said to Jesus in response, like, right, what? This isn’t my stuff. I don’t own any of this.

I can’t sell this. It’s God’s. This belongs to God. How could I possibly sell it? It does. Yeah. It seems, it seems like, especially a Christian, you know what, we talk about justifying wealth with proverbs, but yeah, if you’re a Christian, theoretically, the, the teachings of Jesus and sort of the, The New Testament should be the main. The. The more dominant guide. And it feels really clear about the hoarding of wealth and the, And. And the, The. Yeah, the, The. The dot. The. The making other people miserable. Yeah, because you want more.

And, and it’s not just an individual thing. It’s a social thing. Like, these are people who are causing social inequities and causing economic problems for people who they’ve never met and have nothing to do with them. And I can think of another example that’s even more directly related to this. Jesus condemns folks for. And I forget where this passage is. I haven’t read it in a while, but he condemns people who, who say, Corban, do you remember that? Okay, that’s in Mark 7 . But ye say, if a man shall say to his father or mother, it is Corban, that is to say, a gift by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me, he shall be free. That. Oh, I just read the KJV accidentally.

Shame on you.

I get. I get one a year. The idea here is Corban is this word that’s supposed to mean dedicated. And so what this is saying is that children are withholding wealth, money, maybe items of property, of value from their parents, who in. In this situation clearly need them or could be greatly benefited by them by saying, this is dedicated to God, I can’t give it to you. I’m going to hold on to it. I’m going to benefit from it, but it’s God’s, so I’m afraid I can’t turn it over to you.

Yeah. It. He goes on to, to justify all of this thinking with an amazing idea, which is that he says that anyone who think. He says, you can be a socialist if you want to, just don’t blame Christianity. And then he says that it is.

That and definitely don’t read Acts 4 and 5.

Wait, what do Acts 4 and 5 say?

That’s where they said they had all things in common and there were no poor among them. And then Sapphira and Ananias were like, oh, yeah, yeah, we. This was, this was the full amount that we sold our property for. And then God’s like, zap. So.

Right. Oh, that’s right. They died. Huh?

Yeah. Wow. Okay.

Yeah. So excuse me for laughing, but this was a long, long time ago, so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the. So, so yeah, he’s. He’s saying, don’t be. You can be socialist if you want, but don’t blame Christianity.

And then I will blame being socialist on Christianity.

Right, Right.

He seems to think that they’re against one another. And he says, and he then says, he says it, he says that’s. And that’s meaning, like being against the massive accumulation of wealth, I assume.

Or of things. He says that’s a form of heresy called Gnosticism, that believes that the material is bad and anyone that has material, their soul is in jeopardy. Now, you and I talked about Gnosticism a few weeks, a few episodes back. I don’t remember that being the kind of material that we were talking about, like not owning material wealth. I don’t think that was what the. What, what it was all on about.

But no, that. That’s Jesus. That’s. Jesus is the one who’s saying, where you place your heart, you know, there will your. Or there. Where wherever your treasure is, there your heart will be. And you cannot serve God and wealth and give away all that you own. That’s Jesus. What Gnosticism is talking about is that the material world, not material wealth, but the entire material world is corrupt. And we are fundamentally spirits that are trying to escape from the fleshly prisons of the material world. Gnostics are not like, if you’re poor, you’re cool, but if you have lots of stuff, you’re evil. Like, that’s, that’s not Gnosticism.

Right, right.

This is.

But it does seem like. It does seem like one of the things that the narcissist, narcissists, nastics. Thank you. That the Gnostics are. Are against, would be holding fast to the values of a material world.

Absolutely.

So. So yeah, I think. I think he does have something to fear from Gnosticism.

Well, yeah, he’s on. He’s on the short end of Gnosticism and Jesus. Like, both of them are like, what?

No, yeah, you’re not the guy. Yeah, there you go. The, the anti Gnostic and anti. The whole thing was just a very. It’s funny because the, the. The initial question that somebody wrote into him didn’t mention him at all. Didn’t say anything about, hey, Dave, you personally, how can you just. It just said, how do you. How do we justify this as a concept? Isn’t it greed? And. Ooh.

The defensiveness of this man Dave was immediately like, I took that personally.

Dave just told on himself. Like, he took the entire time to just tell on himself and because, you know, there.

There’s an. Within Christian nationalism there. There’s got to be some kind of. Of reckoning. There’s got to be some kind of discussion going on about, you know, what about, you know, the whole. Sell everything that you own. Like, these people are talking and, and they’ve got to be trying to convince each other that they’re okay. So I think Ramsey was just like, time to rattle off the. The litany of. Of excuses that I’ve heard other people come up with for why it’s okay to be monumentally wealthy in the face of such extreme social inequality in this world and be a Christian at the same time, and then to even be like, I’m a better Christian than y’all. Y’all are awful Christians.

Well, if you think this. I mean, his theory that all of my stuff, because I’m Christian, just by virtue of me being Christian, all of my stuff belongs to God. It makes it like, what he can then do is by that logic, more accumulation means God has more stuff. And that’s an inherently good thing. Not. He doesn’t say how that’s a good thing, but as long as God. God’s accruing more stuff, that must be okay. And therefore I’m a good person and shut up. Great.

Well, and, and I think there I, I imagine he has this parable in mind of the, the wise steward where God gives them the, the talents and they invest it and, and you know, the one who is scared and buries their talent and God comes back and says, where’s my. Where’s my increase? And they say, oh, I just buried it, but here’s the talent back that you gave me. And then God is like, and, and gets upset with them. That’s probably an excuse. He’s. He’s would ultimately end up appealing to that he is the wise steward. But by generating all this increase. What the parable manifestly does not talk about though, is, is all the bodies left in the wake of an. An entire generation that will never be able to own a house and can barely afford eggs right now.

Yeah, I, I find that parable deeply problematic. And maybe we should do it at some point. Maybe we should parable here on the show because it’s, it’s a tricky one, you know, for all of our talking about Jesus, you know, being very anti-wealth or whatever, that seems to fly in the face of it. So yeah, maybe we should. We. We should address that.

And he, and he uses kings and wealthy folks and slave owners and things like that in, in a number of parables, which does kind of sound odd in light of the rest of his blessed are the poor and the meek rhetoric. So. Yeah, that would be interesting.

So, so may, you know, maybe. Maybe Dave Ramsey’s right. Maybe Dave Ramsey, maybe with that, with the parable of the talents. Now, now you got me thinking. Maybe he’s okay.

Well, if the Old Testament prophets and, and Jesus have anything to say. Well, yeah, but we’re splitting Jesus along these, these parable and yeah, because it’s not a. The parables are not really prescriptive, but hey, go sell everything you have and give the money to the poor is pretty prescriptive.

That’s pretty prescriptive. That’s. That’s fairly unambiguous. It’s true.

We’ve got a fever and the only prescription is to sell everything that you own and give the money to the poor. Yeah, exactly, Cowbell. So.

All right, well, that was great. And I hope Dave Ramsey comes after us for it.

We can use the attention.

That’s right. Come at me, Ramsey. Don’t. Yeah, don’t, don’t. Go to him for your advice. Anyway, let’s move on to. I’m sure now I’m going to get a lot of emails because I’m sure some of our listeners have felt like they’ve gotten great advice from Dave Ramsey. Anyway, so, yes, our next thing is. What’s that?

And the.

What’s that for, for, for this thing is the Deuteronomistic history. Yes, I said, I said all of those syllables. I’m just going to be clear that I, I achieved that much on the show today. So, so talk to me. You suggested this as a, as a topic. Yeah, and I said. And I literally was like, well, what is that? So let’s, let’s start at the beginning and, and talk about the Deuteronomy. When and what, what are we talking about here? What, what is this history? What are we, what are we on about?

We’re talking about a modern theoretical construction regarding the composition of not just the Pentateuch, but of several other books of the Hebrew Bible. Because we’ve, we’ve talked a bit about the documentary hypothesis in the past, and this goes back to like the 1700s, and this was developed into the 1800s, into the 1900s, into the 2000s. And we’re, we’re not quite into the 2100s yet, but it will continue to develop. And the idea is basically that the Pentateuch was woven, stitched together from multiple different documentary sources in the, in the classical iteration of the documentary hypothesis. And those sources are J for the Yahwist, E for the Elohist, P for the Priestly source, and D for the Deuteronomist. Now, in the early 20th century, we had this German theologian named Martin Noth who noticed that there was a lot of resonances in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings and the book of Deuteronomy .

…of resonances in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings and the book of Deuteronomy . He noticed a lot of, a lot of kind of literary callbacks and things like this. And he developed this theory that there was a, a redactor who was responsible for a single literary unit, a text that included Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. And he called this the Deuteronomistic history. And, and it’s, it seems to be based on this idea of this covenant idea that, that God struck a covenant with Israel and that theology is pervasive in all of these texts. And there’s a lot of language that’s similar. And one of the parts of this theory was that this, was, this redaction took place long after the events that are being narrated. And one of the reasons for this is he noticed that there were a lot of places where the narrative talks about how, you know, this thing was built.

And it is there until this day. Ad hayom hazeh in Hebrew—until the day that this one.

So meaning until right, right now? Yeah. As of the writing of this.

As of the writing of this. And you know, when you think about that, authors don’t say, “Hey, this thing just happened and you can go and see the remnants of the building, the battle, the whatever, and it remains down until this very day.” Like, like that’s not something you say about something that you witnessed yourself. That’s something you say about they completed…

That building next door and it remains there even now.

Yeah, this is something you say about things that happened in antiquity.

Right.

But the results of which continue to be evident and you can go check it out for yourself. And so you have this “until this day” language occurring in—it occurs a handful of places toward the end of Genesis, like a couple times in Genesis 19 , 22, 26, and then it’s like 35, 47, 48, once in Exodus, once in Numbers, and then a bunch of times in Deuteronomy and Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. And so one gets the idea that this redactor was kind of bringing a lot of stuff together and seems to be kind of stitching some of this stuff with this language.

And why are we calling this person the redactor rather than the—rather than the collector or the bringing together or the—you know what I mean?

I think the MCU probably has copyright on the Collector. So the Tivan Group, I think, is run by the Collector. And—but it’s a, it’s a literary theory. It’s part of the documentary hypothesis that this person was not writing any of these things. They were—they were basically drawing them together, weaving them together to create this literary superstructure that is known as the Deuteronomistic history. And it can be woven into theories about the development of Deuteronomy. There are arguments about whether or not the Deuteronomistic history was there from the very beginning, with the very first layers of Deuteronomy that may have been composed just before Josiah, may have been composed by Josiah, may have been collected by the scribes of Josiah. So like traditionally, Deuteronomy 12 to 26 is identified as one of the earliest layers of Deuteronomy.

And so there’s an argument that the Deuteronomistic history is already coming together with that earliest layer. But it’s phenomenally complex and you know, you have a lot of different people arguing a lot of different positions. There’s a really good book from about 15 years ago called The So-Called Deuteronomistic History by Thomas Romer, who is a—did we—were you—I think we ran into him at SBL. Oh yeah, yeah. Remember we were coming out of the book exhibit at one point, I was like, “Hold on, I gotta talk to that guy.” And I thought it was somebody else. And, and he was like, “No, I’m Thomas.” And I was like, “Oh yeah.” I was like, “We want to have you on the podcast.” And he gave me his card, which reminds me, I need to reach out to him. But he—he wrote this wonderful book and, and he has this theory that within Deuteronomy 12 you can see three different literary layers. The very earliest layer of Deuteronomy and then a later redaction, and then a later redaction.

And it, you know, when you get deep in the weeds, it gets really complex and really annoying. But I think that the theory itself is, is such a fascinating one. And once you know the, the details of it, it’s interesting to be reading through the text and be like, “The Deuteronomist rears his head again.”

So, meaning you’re catching moments of like sort of a reiteration or a—an idea that has, that has sort of come back around or…

Yeah. And, and think. And these are things that kind of point to the main rhetorical goals of this redactor, which are related to cult centralization. The idea that everything, all worship needs to be focused on the temple in Jerusalem needs to be focused exclusively on Adonai, needs to go exclusively through the prescribed priesthood. And there’s another, there’s some other language that I talked about that, that we find in, in Deuteronomy, when I mentioned this to you, the idea that God is going to choose a place to place his name or cause his name to dwell.

And, and you were like, I, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but okay, great. But this is one of the hints.

That, you know, Deuteronomy has some places if, if God wants to find a place for his name to dwell, they actually belong to God so he could just claim them.

And so one of the interesting things is the book of Deuteronomy is supposed to have been written long before Jerusalem became the location of, of God’s temple.

And so I can see that being.

A problem, but it’s being written well after it has been established. Right. But the king wants Deuteronomy to centralize worship in Jerusalem. So the way they get around this is by having God talk cryptically about the place I will choose, which is always a substitution for Jerusalem.

Right, okay.

Like that’s a. The foregone conclusion is that Jerusalem is where we’re headed. And so, but I, I love the fact that, that the phrase is the, the place God will choose to cause his name to dwell. And I think the, the Hebrew is leshakken shemo sham, where literally to cause to dwell his name there. And this plays into what is known as name theology, which is something that we find in, in Deuteronomy and pops up in a few places in the Deuteronomistic history. And this is the idea that God does not dwell bodily or personally in the temple, but God’s name is there. And God’s name is kind of the manifestation of God’s power and authority. And, and this relates to work I’ve done on divine images. And my argument is that this is about the inscription of the divine name on a divine image that is placed in the temple. And in that sense, the divine name is, is dwelling in that divine image.

It doesn’t, it almost wouldn’t even have to be inscribed. Just the, I mean, my understanding of, at least of your theory of, of the, of divine imagery or whatever, like, yes, it’s an inscription would be, would be one thing, but it can also be theoretical. Right. It could also be just like the concept of God’s name is enough to carry sort of the weight of God’s presence.

Yes. And that’s what we see once we get into Greco-Roman period Judaism and the New Testament. Like, I, I made a video today where I was talking about the, the times in the Gospel of John where Jesus is like, yes, you gave your name to me, and through your name I have, you know, guarded my, my followers. And, and the reception of the name is so important to this early Christology. But it’s not like God was like inscribing the name of God on Jesus. This is just an abstract notion of, of the name as a, as a vehicle for divine agency. So yeah, it doesn’t even have to be material. It can by this time it, it has become abstract and conceptual.

Well, even, even the, the Ten Commandments take not, you know, demanding that you not take the name of the Lord in vain was a, was a concept that like somehow just invoking the name had its own power.

And, and that’s a power that you shouldn’t use vainly, you shouldn’t use for. For silly or. Or untoward purposes.

And, and at the same time, though, to speak the name is. Is to materialize the name, at least in the sense that what we hear as sound waves is material. And, and we. We tend to think of things that we can’t feel and see and. And touch as existing a different way than the things that we can see and feel and touch. But, but auditory things are. Are material. So there’s an. Anciently, I think they would have thought of speech as, you know, something that’s actually materially affecting the world around us. And so that would have lent itself to this understanding of names as powerful because they are affecting the world. So, yeah, that’s another way that. And in my opinion, one of my theories that I develop in my book, Yahweh’s Divine Images, and that I’ve got to further develop in a paper I’m going to be presenting at a conference later this year is that the pronunciation of the name became taboo precisely because it was reifying the divine presence outside of the temple and therefore, in an inappropriate location.

And so you couldn’t say the divine name unless you were in the temple. And once the temple was destroyed, then you can never say the divine name.

Yeah, that I… we’re gonna need to do a… that’s another topic for another show because the… the temple itself is such an important concept and it keeps… it feels like it shifts a bunch of times. The way that it’s talked about and the way that it is conceptualized changes. And it seems so odd to me that the temple was destroyed and then that’s just it. There’s no more. You know what I mean? Like, and they had rebuilt it before, but that was the last time. We’re just, we’re just done with the temple for now.

Yeah. And… and I think circumstances prevented them. I mean, Rome, they… they couldn’t come back and be like, hey, Rome, can we rebuild? Because, because Rome had done other stuff in… in the area and they were… yeah, they were persona non grata there for… for quite some time. But… and, and you know, there are a bunch of people who are trying to get the third Temple rebuilt. They… there are… the Temple Institute is preparing all of the implements and utensils and things like that that would be needed in the temple. Most, if not all of those things are already built and being stored. Okay. In fact, if you go into Jerusalem today through… I… oh shoot, I forget which gate you got… you got to go through, but it’s one… the gate on the northwest side and round the corner, they have on display a menorah that has been built for use in a…

A future temple. Huh? Yeah. So it’s in a big glass case. Glass, plexiglass, I don’t know, something probably… I assume it’s supposed to be pretty durable and indestructible, but you can go see the menorah that they have constructed. So not…

Not unlike the… the Deuteronomistic idea of there will be at some point.

Yeah. Where God chooses to.

God chooses?

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. I.

And you like how I circled it back? I was, I was like… I was like, we’ve gone a bit afield from… from the Deuteronomistic history.

But… but that project is… I, I tend to think of the Deuteronomistic project, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history as probably the most influential literary campaign in the history of… of the world in terms of its influence, because… and, and people talk about the… the Quran and stuff like that. You don’t have a Quran without Judaism. And… and so what Josiah did and what the… the authors of Deuteronomy and the rest of the Deuteronomistic history did was recreate the history of Israel in their past in a certain way, which influenced everything that came after. Related to the temple. And it came right before the temple was destroyed. And then it gets further revised and redacted after the destruction of the temple and probably after the rebuilding of the temple as well. And that creates a pretty thick layer of… of ideology that gets passed down and within a few centuries becomes scripture and becomes, you know, the word of God and ever since has… has to some degree governed how people think about temple and temple sacrifices and…

And all that kind of stuff. But… and now we’re uncovering temples that were built six miles from Jerusalem that were operative during the First Temple period. The Tel Moza temple, for instance, is one of them. We got the Arad temple down south in, in the Negev as well. So we know there were multiple temples operating prior to the exile. And I… I think that lends credence to the theory that Josiah was like, I’m gonna put a stop to all this nonsense, to the theory that… that Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic history were an attempt to centralize and consolidate worship and control over it. But yeah, we ought to do a show on… on the First Temple.

And what we know and don’t know about it. I think that would be fun.

I love it. All right. Well, I, I think that that’s run its course. Yeah, I think, I mean, it’s so, it’s fascinating. I’m just trying… it’s a lot to take in because I… there’s so much like you… you’re talking about how complex it is and I’m just trying to like skim the surface and it’s still very, very complex. But, but yeah, this, I think. Okay, we’re going to do the temple. I’m going to write it down. Okay, hang on. I’m going to write it down.

Let it be written. Let it be so.

Yes, exactly. All right, I’ll write it down later.

Don’t have anything to write on. Well, that’s it for this week’s show. If you would like to become a part of making this show go, of helping us to make, make ends meet, we would love for you to do that. Go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma or search it in the search bar and, and you can choose what level you want to join. You can give at any level, but if you give at certain levels, you can get bonus content every week. You can get access to an early and ad-free version of every show. So that’s always great. If you’d like to get in touch with us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

The Dave Ramsey Takedown

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology