Wandering in the Wilderness

The reason that we look for an Exodus and a Moses in the Late Bronze Age is because we understand this story as history writing. But once we understand that, oh, this started at least its life as fictional biography, that is political allegory, suddenly the whole world can look different.

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 we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things, Dan?

Man, it is. Spring has sprung here in Salt Lake City. It’s.

We hit the 70s for the first time.

The high 70s, my friend. High 70s. I, I was out for a walk and was sweating a little bit, so, so life is good. I’m happy. There’s, you know, some of the trees are getting leaves and, you know, the world’s just coming back to life. And I’m, I’m into that.

But the SAD is hitting the bricks for a lot of folks around my neck of the woods, which is always nice.

Yeah. Hey, let’s stop jabbering and get on with our, because we got a guest here in the house. So why don’t you introduce our guest?

Say hi, everybody, to Angela Roskop Erisman, who is joining us from Cincinnati. Right?

Fantastic.

Thank you so much for joining us this evening, Angela. And we are here to talk about a few different things. But first off, we were talking a little bit about your background and that you are an independent scholar who specializes in Torah or Pentateuch or whatever, whatever you want to call the first five books of Moses. And you have a bit of a non-traditional background when it comes to your Bible scholarship. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Sure, sure. I have a pretty traditional path through graduate school. I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Hebrew Union College here in Cincinnati. So that’s a pretty standard path. But I married a bourbon distiller and needed to stay near Kentucky.

You know what? That is a good reason to stay near Kentucky, I will give you that.

The heart wants what the heart wants, right?

I guess so.

As does the liver, apparently.

So, you know, I’ve done a variety of different things. I’m one of the founding editors of the Marginalia Review of Books and I do editorial work for various clients that I’ve taught in various places. And of course, I am very busy also with my own scholarship. And I share your interest in making sure that everybody gets access to the Bible. And so I care very much about those issues and so I’m just delighted to be here.

Well, you mentioned the Marginalia Review of Books, which means you know Timothy Michael Law.

I certainly do.

He was my thesis supervisor at Oxford.

Yeah. When, and he, I think that was around the time he was writing When God Spoke Greek. Yeah. So, yeah. Wonderful guy. Yeah. I have not talked to him for a while. He is gallivanting around the world doing all kinds of entrepreneurial stuff.

He is.

Well, that’s, that’s great to meet another, another person from the Marginalia Review of Books. I’ve really appreciated some of the stuff that they have put out just for.

Those of us who aren’t deep in the, in, in the world of biblical academia, tell us what that group is like. What is the Marginalia? I don’t know what that word is even. So help us out.

Yeah. It started, oh gosh, 2012, 2013, as an online review of books in the field of religion and ancillary fields. And they brought me on initially as someone who would acquire reviews in Hebrew Bible. And then they realized that I have a background in editing and publishing, which became a little bit useful in that context. So, you know, we, that’s, I believe, what the Marginalia Review of Books still does. I haven’t been affiliated with it for several years now, but they’re still putting out great stuff, you know, high level, long reads, but you know, making it available. The same thing you guys are doing.

Love it. That’s great.

Love it. That’s great. It’s been, it’s. I’ve. I’ve really enjoyed it as a, as a resource. It has also been a while since I’ve. I’ve been deeply involved in that reading. But when, when we talked about having you on the show, one of the things that I appreciated was that you told me you were going to go pick out a shirt. Because I have a reputation and the folks, the folks who are. Who are listening to this, you know, we’ll just have to imagine things. But I am wearing a shirt that I was actually I got for free at a Comic Con that is. It’s several of the Avengers but eight bit graphics. So it’s. They’re the eight bit Avengers. And every time I wear this in a video, people ask me where I got the shirt. A lot of people like it, but can you. You told us there was a story behind the shirt.

There’s a story behind my shirt. And it’s not a gaming shirt or. Well, it is a kind of gaming shirt because it’s related to our Major League Soccer team, FC Cincinnati. Okay. But it says, as you will see, Hell is Real. Okay. So I have to tell you the story behind Hell is Real. So, you know, being here from. From the Midwest, and I’ve lived my entire life in the. In the Midwest. I went to Wisconsin, went to college in Wisconsin. I grew up in Minnesota. We have a lot of kitschy things in the Midwest, including road signs.

In fact, here in Cincinnati, we have a whole museum dedicated to American road signs. It’s pretty cool. If you ever come through, you should check it out. But on the interstate between Cincinnati and Columbus is a great big sign that some guy decided decades ago that he would put in his cornfield or whatever he’s growing there that says it’s giant, and it says Hell is Real with a red H, and it’s a black sign, and the other letters are outlined. If you Google Hell is Real sign, you can see it.

Yeah. So the.

Doing it now.

Doing it now. The soccer connection is. Because the rivalry now between the Cincinnati and Columbus MLS teams is called the Hell is Real Derby because of this sign. So it’s a piece of Cincinnati kitsch.

Everyone here knows the Hell is Real sign.

Right.

Anyway, you know, the truth is that coming from Salt Lake City, as I do, I read that when I think about Major League Soccer, when I read that, it says Hell is Real.

Because.

Because Real Salt Lake is our. Is our local team.

Yeah. Yeah. And of course, you can buy a beer at the stadium, Hell is Real. That’s a kind of beer also. Anyway, but this shirt has a significance to what we’re doing today, because, of course, that sign, setting aside the soccer. The purpose of that sign is to scare people into religious belief. Right, right.

Absolutely.

And as you probably know, I deal with the rhetoric of fear in my book.

Yes, that was something that kept popping up. I did notice that there were a couple other things that kept popping up, too, which I want to talk about.

Yeah, sure. So I don’t want to make you start in a particular place, but I thought that when I was looking for a kitschy shirt to wear, I was like, that is the one I love.

It really ties the room together. To quote the great poetry, which. Which brings up one of the things we’re here to talk about.

Your recent publication with Cambridge University Press, The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation, which just came out the beginning of this year, correct?

It did, yeah.

Okay. Congratulations on that, by the way.

Thank you so much.

I hope you’ve been getting wonderful feedback so far.

It’s. It’s early, you know.

Yeah, it’s early.

They’re going to be, as you know, books are new for like, three years.

And that. That is true. Which is so weird. My. My trade book is coming out shortly and, like, there are already reviews out.

It won’t get published for over a month, and there are already reviews out. And I particularly liked it because one of them was from. Oh, gosh, some. Some very big literary outfit.

I said I was sorry about that one, Dan. I thought it was funny.

Yeah. Luckily, the channels through which biblical scholarship gets peer reviewed tend to weed those kinds of things out.

In the world of trade publishing, we have no such luck. But your book, obviously dealing with the wilderness narratives, is going to be about Exodus, Numbers, some of the events and the characters that are in that. But I noticed something that I, that I really enjoyed reading through the introduction. You talk quite a bit about genre, which is something that’s, you know, it’s so hot right now, at least for biblical scholars. But I wonder if you wouldn’t mind, because most of our listeners are not going to have the background that I think your, the reader you projected for this book would have on these debates. Can you talk a little bit?

Half of the podcast cohosts of this don’t have the background for this.

Almost 50% of them. Would you mind talking a little bit about this, this background that you’re, you’re alluding to this debate in the intellectual history regarding historicity and genre, so that we can get a foundation for where you’re taking this discussion.

Sure thing. I would, I would, if I may, separate those two issues, genre and history. So they have a lot to do with each other. But let’s talk about genre first, because that was really what made me want to undertake this study because we have these episodes throughout the wilderness narrative, the complaint episodes. You know, so the Israelites complain and Moses responds, and God comes in with a miracle, and either everything is okay or everybody gets punished. Right.

That’s the gist, quote, unquote, punished.

Yeah. So, you know, so there’s this, this plot structure repeats itself over and over again. But the stories are all so different, so why is that? And so what I wanted to look at is how that plot structure was combined with different genres that we know from the ancient Near Eastern world, also the Mediterranean. So we have some biography, we have some political allegory, we have some stuff from the Greek world, we have some tragedy, we have some rhetoric, all of which is getting mixed in with this plot structure. So that’s really what genre is about. And the reason why genre is so important is because we can’t interpret a text without a sense of what kind of text we’re reading.

And this matters immensely for the second thing, Dan, that you mentioned, the issue of historicity, or what we might just say, broadly speaking, if I may be super loose about this, the way that a literary text relates to history. Now, we usually think of that happening in only one way. Well, it somehow must match some set of historical events that we then try to go and find. But that is not the only way that literature can relate to history. We, when we write literature, and this is true of literature, in really any period, it’s situated, right? The stuff that the author knows, not just historical dates and people and events, but also places and even genres are historically situated. Right. So genre then becomes a way that we can understand a different kind of relationship between literature and history.

And I think it was one that, for me, was just mind blowing in my, in my study. And I came into this with a lot of experience studying this, and I, you know, my mind was blown repeatedly by what I discovered, so. Well, is that fun?

Yeah, it’s very fun. Can you guide us through a little bit of, of like, what specifically was blowing your mind? Where, give us some of the, some of the broad strokes of, of the things that you discovered as you were exploring this.

Sure. Well, the big one. And I wager you’re going to ask me about this one anyway, so we may as well start with the man himself, Moses. Right? I’m a big fangirl, and even more so now. So who’s Moses? Right? As probably you’ve dealt with on episodes of your podcast that I haven’t listened to or videos of the search to try to find a historical, historical Moses. And, you know, where do we look for that?

And to make sense, this is something.

That I get asked about all the time. People are like, that doesn’t make any sense that he gets—he doesn’t get to enter the promised land. He’s kind of cursed as a result of this weird story where he’s got to draw water from a rock. But water keeps coming up multiple times, not only in the wilderness narratives, but in your book, it comes up. It does, repeatedly, as an important symbol. Sorry to interrupt, but I—

No, no, no. This is a chat. It’s wonderful. I shouldn’t be blabbing the whole time. So that’s the other rock water story. We want to maybe come back to that a little bit later. But the one I want to talk about first is the one in Exodus where he succeeds in—in getting water from a rock. And it’s a good thing. So how do we make sense of this story? And to make a long story short, I realized that it’s linked to the Exodus story, to a version of the Exodus story that involves Moses’s birth story. And as—as biblical scholars have long recognized, that story of, you know, the baby in the basket, we all—we all know that. Modeled on a text about the Assyrian king, Sargon II, who has a—who has a similar story of being abandoned and adopted.

And this is the story of how he becomes king. And the genre of this story is fictional biography. Okay. These are royal texts, and Sargon’s is not the only one, but it’s the one that has the closest relationship with the Exodus story. These—these are royal propaganda, right? They’re—they’re designed to convey to—to others that the king is legitimate. Right? So I realized that these elements of the Moses story are not just in Exodus 2 , but you can track the plot, a plot line, all the way to Exodus 17 . And so the question then becomes, and these fictional biographies in Mesopotamia are political allegory, right? The Sargon narrative is a narrative about the Neo-Assyrian king, Sargon. But it looks like it reads like it’s about Sargon the Great, the king from millennia earlier, the first ever emperor.

And so the biblical story is modeled on that. Why—why would we tell the story of Moses as an Assyrian story? Well, that—that ends with drawing water from a rock. Well, we know a king who was entangled with Assyria. His name is Hezekiah, right? And he was faced with threat from Sargon’s son, Sennacherib. And to survive that threat of siege—well, let—we have to take a step backwards and understand quickly why he was under threat because he had allied against Assyria with Egypt.

Hezekiah’s story starts in Egypt just like Moses’s story starts in Egypt. Right. But that rebellion failed, and Sennacherib is coming, and we are in a lot of trouble now. Right. Not gonna—not gonna win this one. Right. Well, how do we survive it if we can’t win it? How do we survive it? And as we know from the books of Kings and Isaiah, one of the things that Hezekiah did was build an aqueduct to bring water into the city to enable his people to sustain the siege. Well, what do we think the rock water story is about? It’s about this. 701.

Right. This early version of the Exodus narrative is political allegory, right. That is probably designed, I suspect, to convince the Assyrians to leave him on the throne. So. Right.

I’m so sorry. Just—I’m just trying to process this. So the idea is that the Exodus, or at least that part of Exodus, was written in the time of Hezekiah as an allegory that—that the people of that time frame would have understood it allegorically.

It was written allegorically. This is an important difference because in the history of biblical interpretation, there are key interpreters like Philo—Philo of Alexandria and others who interpret the Bible allegorically, which means you can kind of take anything and make an allegory out of it. Right. What I’m saying, Dan, is—is—is what you just said, which is it’s written as allegory. It’s meant to be allegory. And—and that’s a very important difference. So Moses, right? The water drawer. Who’s the water drawer? Who started in alliance with Egypt but ended up independent. It’s Hezekiah. Right. Right. So we have a historical Moses. We do. We do. Right.

But what’s important here is that, well, there’s a lot of important things, but one of them is that we don’t lose a connection to history. We just get a different one. Do you see what I mean?

And that’s what allows the text to gain purchase on an audience. If it’s not somehow informing their experiences or allowing them to, you know, view themselves and their background through the lens of the story, then it’s not going to remain very salient for them. It’s not going to remain important. But if they are reading it as, oh, this is an allegory for our day, then it is something that already has some built in links, it already has some, some relationships built in. And yeah, that was, that would have been considered a pretty monumental achievement of Hezekiah. To reroute the Gihon Spring underneath this, the City of David to, to feed down to the, the Pool of Siloam. And I have walked through that tunnel on multiple occasions and me too, unsettled by it every single time I am beneath I don’t know how many feet of, of bedrock. But yeah, that, that would have been quite the feat. And so it, it makes for an interesting kind of historical, I don’t know, something for the, the story to orbit around in the minds of, of later readers.

So, so you’re putting this toward the end of the 8th century. Just, just out of curiosity, are you imagining this to be the, the very origin of the character of Moses and the tradition of the Exodus, or is this being appropriated from something pre-existing, maybe from the Northern Kingdom? What are your thoughts on, on those ideas?

That’s a great question. We usually think of the Exodus as being, as originating in the Northern Kingdom because it’s mentioned in Hosea and the northern prophet Hosea. The thing is that those references refer to what, at least as I track in my book, are later versions of the story.

I do not think the Exodus story has a northern origin. I think this is, I think this is it. And you know, can we, can we. A different question is can we track a Moses character back through oral tradition, as we used to call it? Now we call it cultural memory, which, which, which is a concept that is really. It’s a valid concept, to be sure, but sometimes I wonder if it isn’t oral tradition come back as a zombie.

Yeah, well, it’s, it’s, it’s not something that we have a lot of data for. We’re basically reconstructing it as, as we go and just trying to figure out what fits the best with our reconstruction of the past.

Right, that’s right. And, and you know, this all fits together so beautifully. Right?

Yeah, it also. Go ahead.

No, yeah, so I don’t, you know, I don’t want to take anyone’s Moses away. On the other hand, you know, I think there’s, it’s harmful even to ourselves as Bible readers to get stuck on things that we wish were there.

Right, absolutely.

And there’s just, there’s no evidence. Right. So why should, why when we have a, a compelling story of how it originated, would we bother? And I say that with empathy and understanding how hard it is to let some of those things go. Right.

Sorry, just to clarify, just, just because I’m, I’m. I’m worried that I’m getting lost here. When you say that there’s no evidence you’re talking about for a historical Exodus, for, for like, for the story of the Exodus and Moses to have actually.

Been real, if one assumes it was history. But you see, what I’ve just shown you is that it is a very real story. It’s just a very different kind of relationship between story and history than we understand. And this goes back to genre because the reason that we look for an Exodus and a Moses in the late Bronze Age is because we understand this story as history writing in some sense. Okay. But once we understand that, oh, this started at least its, its life as, as fictional, autofictional biography, right? That is political allegory, suddenly the whole world can look different.

Is there a sense in which. Because when I think of, when I think of allegory, like purposefully written allegory, it. It occurs to me that, like, each element of it, each plot point, each moment of it that, you know, each big moment of it especially would be, would be representative of something. Would be an allegory for a specific thing that happened in the, in the story that’s being, that’s being presented. Do you have.

Got a lot of reading to do before your comps on the, on the Israelite kings, but.

Yeah, exactly. Look, I, no one ever claimed I was the scholar in this one, in this scenario.

Well, that, that raises a great, great question. You go through several chapters where I, I think what you’re trying to show is how what we see in the allegory can reflect what’s going on on the ground in late 8th century Judah.

Right? It can, but it does in complex ways. I think the idea, what the other Dan is talking about is a very one to one thing thing, A, B, you know, and the great literary scholar Northrop Frye, who had a lot to say about allegory, talks about allegories as working. Like, it’s like listening to a Bach fugue. Right? So you have. And the, and the voices are, are the, the literature and, and the history. Right. And it’s instead of thinking, making it one to one, correspondences makes it what he calls a naive allegory. And it’s, it’s very wooden, right. And unsatisfying. But have you ever listened to a Bach fugue?

Of course. Yeah. Well, the voices are doing interesting things. They’re having, they’re having conversations like we’re, you know, like we’re having here. And, and the, the totality is more than the sum of the parts. Right. And so I think that’s, you know, not to say that people don’t write wooden allegories, but this is not a wooden allegory. Right. It has this very complex relationship with the historical situation. It allegorizes. Because if my reading of it is right, it was probably meant to convince both the Judean elite that Hezekiah had a plan for not running Judah into the ground here. Right. It’s in grave danger of extinction in this moment. And that he had a plan. And probably also to show the Assyrians that I’m like you, right?

My story is your story, right. And you can leave me on the throne. So the text may have had, we don’t have documents to track it out, but may. It would seem to have had a rhetorical function or meant to have a rhetorical function in conversation with the very thing it allegorizes. And that adds up to a kind of complexity that a one to one idea of how allegory works can’t do justice to.

Now you, you mentioned previously that fear is something that comes up over and over again. I’m curious how that is a through line through some of these allegories because it doesn’t strike me that that fear is a, a particularly useful rhetorical instrument in speaking to the Assyrians. It seems like that would have more value in speaking to other Judahites. But how are you addressing fear? And yeah, in the book fear, fear.

Doesn’t really play a role in that particular version of the story. It comes into play. So, so in, in Exodus 17 , when the Israelites come to, when the elders come to complain, they’re really not, you know, often in these stories they’re, they’re complaining because they’re ticked off or they’re afraid, right? In this, in this version of this story, they’re really just holding him accountable. They’re like, man, you know, we got this problem here. It’s a really big problem, right? What are you going to do? You know, you got a plan? What’s going to happen? You can’t let us, right? It’s Your, you’re the king. It’s your job to sustain us and make sure that, that we survive. But as the story gets retold, Emotions come into play, including fear and disgust and anger. Fear and anger, they’re all very closely related.

Disgust less so. But fear and anger are, and blame are bedfellows. And it shows in this, shows up in philosophy on this subject. Martha Nussbaum has written on it, a philosopher that folks might have heard of before among other people. But so when they start complaining out of fear, the dynamics start to change. And so then we see, we see different things start to happen. And we can jump ahead to Numbers on the Korach episode where fear plays a role. I don’t know if you want to dive in.

Want me to go in there, man? Let’s talk about it. Yeah.

Sure, sure. Well, this episode comes significantly later, as I see it, in the literary history of the wilderness narrative. By this time, the Israelites have. The Judeans have been destroyed by the Babylonians. They have experienced exile. And I, along with many scholars now would situate the Korach story in, in the Persian period after they have come back and are striving to re.

Hell is real.

Hell is real. They’ve been through hell and back. I listened to your episode with David Carr where he had a lot to say about trauma as he’s, he’s worked on significantly and how much trauma influences biblical literature. So, you know, I think that this is a, this is a feature of this. And in this episode, fear, the fear doesn’t drive the complaint. In fact, bravery does. Right? Korach. This is not how most people read it, but either way, it takes some chutzpah to stand up to Moses and Aaron and say, hey, what are you doing? Why are you lording it over us? Who gave you all this power? Right? That’s dissent, right? And to speak truth to power, as we know in theory and as we are seeing all the time, takes a great deal of bravery.

And so in the Korach episode, this bravery is met with manipulation. Now, this is not how it’s usually read as I, as I mentioned, Korach is usually seen as the bad guy, right? The rebel. And of course he is framed that way. But you know, whether a rebel or a hero depends on where you stand, doesn’t it? Right, right. So, so as I was looking at, gee, how, how does genre come into play in this episode? I found a lot of rhetorical techniques and I’ll mention a couple. And, and these led me to read the episode very differently. So they, they hold Moses accountable. And instead of answering their charge, Moses says, who are you to complain about who is holy? Right.

Not your job. That’s God’s job to say who and what is holy. So what, what Moses does, it sounds good, right? It sounds like humility, right? It sounds like, let’s, let’s leave that up to God and let God decide. But note what he does in that story. He establishes a procedure for determining God’s word on this point of contention that involves Korach and the 250 lay people—Korach is a Levite—who are with him. That involves them offering incense. And if we go back to the beginning of the Book of Numbers , we learn that even handling the objects required to offer incense is a death sentence. You, you are doomed to die. Unless you’re Aaron. Right? Unless you’re Aaron, you’re not supposed to handle those things. You’re not supposed to offer incense.

You’re not supposed to handle those things. So this is a setup, right?

Right. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yes, it’s a setup. Right. It’s, it’s not, it looks like like Moses is, is setting up a, a trial by—or you know, a trial by ordeal. Right. A decision that, that God will make. But its conclusion, if you’ve read the beginning of Numbers, is foreordained. Right. You know what it’s going to be even before they, before they, they go and offer the incense. And as, as we know, they’re incinerated when they do it. So it’s a terrifying story. So the fear in this story, the purpose of this story as I read it, is to tamp down dissent, right? It’s not aimed at the rebels. Right. It’s aimed at dissuading us reading the story from being rebels. Because this is what’s going to happen to you if you challenge authority. Right? So there’s some dirty pool happening in this, in this, in this story.

And it was really shocking to see. And I have to be honest that, you know, as excited as I was to discover how, how the rock water story works, it took me a couple of months to accept that this is how the Korach story works because I didn’t want that to be there. Do you know what I mean? And I want to say that because I think a lot of probably your, your, your audience, people listening to Data over Dogma don’t want to find dirty pool in the Bible. We’re not looking for dirty pool in the Bible. Right, right. But, but it’s there. Right. And it’s, and, and when we think about what it’s designed to do, that it’s, it’s manipulating fear. Right. Fear of death to, to coerce obedience to power. Yeah. We all know how destructive that can be. Right.

It’s also very interesting political thinking because the, it, it portends, you know, in almost a mind-boggling way. This is Thomas Hobbes’s argument in Leviathan for the modern state. Right. That, that, right, that, that.

Machiavellian approach to, to how we, it is, run the government. And, and you talk quite a bit about the political allegory running through all of this and the, and the role of politics. And do you have in mind—so we’re talking about the Persian period—do you have in mind any particular specific time period or ruler whose, whose sovereignty is intended to be rendered unquestionable or inviolable by this?

Are you able to get so granular with, with when you think this is operating?

Yes. And, and I should, I probably shouldn’t be so confident about that because we are rightly, we are rightly cautious. We should be cautious about these things. But once I realized it was allegory and was able to start tracking these things, there’s a similar dynamic happening in the books of Haggai and Zechariah. Right. Where we have a priest jockeying for political power there. The priest’s name is Joshua ben Jehozadak. That is Aaron’s historical alter ego.

Okay, so this is, has a budding rod somewhere in, in his house, right?

Yeah, well, of course the budding rod is itself—and I write about this in the book—it’s, it’s a wonderful mishmash of, of images. Right. You know, the, the idea of a wooden rod that sprouts, you know, evokes Isaiah 11 and the, right, the, the, the shoot that shall come from the stump of Jesse. Right. So this is all royal imagery and it’s so beautifully intertextual. Right. These scribes were, you know, if there’s anything I came away from this book with that I didn’t have before, it was a, such a deep sense of how incredibly intelligent and talented and creative these scribes who are responsible for our Bible were.

Yeah. And this is something that I have to push back against quite frequently on, on social media. The idea that these are the, the scribblings of goat herders from, from—usually people say the Bronze Age or the Iron Age—but yeah, I, I think they don’t appreciate exactly how skilled these folks were in, in these languages. These are among the most, the most talented and the well educated—most well-educated people in that part of the world.

Absolutely true.

Yeah. And, and I think there’s, there’s an awful lot that, that we can learn about how genre worked in this time period by, by understanding that—unfortunately for folks who I, I find that a lot of folks who are drawn to the kind of content I produce sometimes bring with it a degree of cynicism and even invective regarding the, the qualities and the value of the Bible that, that they tend to gloss right over an awful lot of that stuff, which is quite unfortunate.

Yeah. And you know, to, to those folks, I would say—and I know that we find them across the spectrum. Right. I’ve, I’ve taught in Christian contexts, I’ve taught in Jewish contexts, I’ve taught in secular contexts. And, and I think that what I would say is that the Bible is for everybody. There’s something in it for everybody. Nobody owns it. We all share it and we all—there’s a great beauty in getting together to talk about what’s going on in it. And it’s full of messages that are meaningful in spiritual ways. It’s full of political theory—not theory in the philosophy, in the philosophical sense. But they weren’t writing philosophy, but they were thinking about these same ideas. There’s no question. And it’s really rich, you know, such great material for, for folks who are interested in that.

It’s. The literary creativity is mind-boggling and so it’s beautiful and I just want to invite people in.

Now. A question I have before we move on is what do you think these allegories are trying to say about the relationship of the palace to the temple? Because that, that is something that is kind of woven throughout the, the Exodus story. If Moses is representative of royalty, of, of political power, we do have, over and against that power is the power of the priesthood. Do you think this is, this is an attempt to hierarchize things so that everybody understands the—the palace has priority over the temple? Because there are also instances where, where the, the privilege of the priesthood seems to come out on top.

Right, right. Well, I think that that’s a great question. I don’t think it’s the right question for this narrative because the only version I understand to be pre-exilic when there would have been both a temple and a palace is that earliest Exodus, that story about Moses.

And so the rest of it is exilic or post-exilic. So even in those, even in those stories that I think are, are, you know, are post-exilic, we have to understand them in a context where the king was the Persian emperor. Right? There was no king. Right. So there was no palace. Right. But why are they talking about kingship and sovereignty? Why all the royal imagery, even in Aaron’s vestments?

Right. There’s a lot of that that is royal imagery. The rosette on his, on his turban, on his headdress is, is a royal image, an Assyrian royal image. I find that the most helpful idea for this, for me, came from the scholarship of Ian Wilson. He talks about kingship discourse.

And I think this is really important because it helps us understand how we can, how the literature can still be using ideas and images about kingship to talk about political power in general. Right. So even though there was, there was no king, and again, we have to get away from these texts being merely descriptive. Right. They weren’t just describing what was going on, they were interacting with, trying to shape the world they lived in. Right. So, so to use the deep history of kingship imagery to jockey for political power, whether you’re Zerubbabel or, or Joshua or Nehemiah. Right. And I think we might be seeing some of all of that happening getting worked out in sort of what you might call loosely an epic form in the wilderness narrative.

And we, we see similar things today with a, with a lot of people trying to cast themselves as players in some kind of mythical golden age thing where, you know, the Tea Party, where we’re, we’re going back to a time period where, where those kinds of things don’t really happen anymore. Those roles aren’t operative anymore in our society. But people want to cast themselves in those roles. And it seems to me, sometimes in an attempt to try to invoke the same outcomes, to try to influence the future towards getting out of their present what happened in the past. So in another way using the past to inform their experiences in the present.

Yeah. The imagery is powerful, and I think it matters. This is an issue that comes up in my book, I think. I don’t talk about it in the book, but I’m going to in my blog as I write sort of more readily accessible versions of what I’ve talked about in the book. It matters how you use it. So we have this, this dirty pool rhetoric in the, in the Korach story, but the story doesn’t end there, thank goodness. Right. And so we see Moses in other episodes trying to use rhetoric in a different way instead of to drive wedges in the community and, and terrify people, to hold God and Israel together. Right. We see, we see cases like that. So I was listening to a book the other day, an audiobook by a philosopher named Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works.

And early on in that book, he, he points out, and I can’t remember the context, but that it, it, there are good actors and bad actors. Right. And it matters which one you are. Right. Rhetoric itself is not bad inherently, but in the hands of bad actors, right, it can do a lot of harm. Right. In the hands of good actors, it can repair relationships and restore wholeness.

And defend vulnerable groups.

Exactly. That’s, that’s something that I think we see an awful lot in the Hebrew Bible as well. We see, we see marginalized groups, at least in the, on the broader geopolitical scale, trying to defend themselves and trying to survive, even if it does involve some dirty pool. Yeah, here and there.

Yeah. One of the things that I, I want to acknowledge is, is it’s uncomfortable to see these stories that are just deeply manipulative. Right. Trouble—what is Phyllis Trible’s term for this, “troubled texts”? Trouble…

I can’t.

I can’t remember it exactly.

But just problematic texts that just don’t sit well with us, and rightly so. But I, I think there’s value in them being in scripture because they show us possibilities that we might not otherwise want to think about, but that are important to know about. Right. They show us our ugly side, and I think it’s important to know our ugly side as a community, because if we don’t know it, it can come up and bite us in the rear.

And if we, if we are never exposed to it, we think we don’t have one. And yes, we’re never wrong.

And I, I think of Alexiana Fry when you mentioned Phyllis Trible, because I think the phrase is Texts of Terror.

That’s it.

Is that what you’re thinking about?

Yes, I am.

Thank you.

Because Alexiana Fry, who does a lot of work with trauma theory and the Hebrew Bible, she has a series on social media where she talks about Texts of Terror, and then she talks an awful lot about very, very traumatic stories. But, but showing that a lens of trauma can help us understand, operationalize these texts in, in ways other than than how they were probably intended.

But the, you know, the wilderness, there’s a through line through the wilderness narrative, and it starts at the sea. Exodus 14 is one of these complaint episodes. It’s just a very complex one. And in it, Moses engineers survival and it’s a great way to start. And this line runs through the entire wilderness narrative of healing and repair from the damage that the Aaron character has done. Right. There are several episodes that directly counter this dirty pool rhetoric. And so we see the possibility of even healing from what’s broken.

Yeah, I think that’s great. Aaron does a lot of damage and doesn’t seem to face too much accountability for it. He manages to survive through the narrative, which is, which is, which is unusual, particularly when he’s creating an idol for everybody to, to worship right before Moses says, oh, that means death with the, with the commandments. I, I had a question. You, the last time you brought up the word complaint, it reminded me of some work that I’ve done on the complaint genre within the Psalms, particularly related to Psalms 82 , because I, I talk about that as, as kind of a hybrid of, of different genres. The divine council motif is being combined with the riv-complaint or the riv-pattern, so that Adonai is issuing a complaint to the gods of the divine council. And, and I’m curious if you see any, any resonance between these complaint episodes and the complaint genre within the Psalms where you have this pattern of, of saying, here’s our problem.

Here’s what you have done for us in the past. We know you can help us get up and do something. Do you see any resonance with the, the complaints that you’re identifying in these narratives?

There. There’s certainly. I, I haven’t really thought about that, but there’s certainly an emotional resonance. Right.

Do we have any, and do we have any questions? The, where the complaints begin with why are you doing this? Why are you allowing this to happen? How long are you going to allow this to happen? That kind of stuff.

Not how long, but certainly why.

The word, the word lammah, lammah occurs in many of the complaints.

But those are generally there are exceptions, but generally addressed to Moses. Yeah.

You do make a distinction in the book between cries to God and complaints to Moses specifically.

When, and talk a little bit about, about the differences between those, between those two kinds of complaining.

Well, you know, they’re effectively the same. It’s just a question of, of who the Israelites perceive is their leader in any given situation. Right. Who the, who the royal figure is. Right. So in what I see to be the exilic version of the narrative, they are imagining very much like Deutero-Isaiah. They’re imagining a march home from exile. Right. And the royal language in Deutero-Isaiah and also in the wilderness narrative for God is no accident. Right. In the absence of a king. Right. In a, in a, in a, in a story, whether it’s poetic or in narrative form, where they are imagining liberation from their oppressive foreign emperor, they imagine God. All those, all those that kingship discourse. Right. That role is occupied by God.

Right. But sometimes in the wilderness, even when they ought to know that it’s God who brought them out of Egypt. Right. In, in that version of the story. Out of Babylon. Right. Out of exile, the story gets revised. Right. And then this becomes the, the, the allegorical situation. They, you know, they, they should know that God liberated them, but yet they’re still addressing their complaints to Moses.

And, and it’s also interesting in light of Exodus 7:1 , where God tells Moses, I will make you a God to Pharaoh, and, and Aaron will be your spokesperson. And if he’s there, it seems like there could be some ambiguity in, in what role Moses is playing in the wilderness narratives. In light of that he is taking the place of God in the minds of some of the folks who are complaining.

I think the key to that one is Aaron is his spokesperson. Right. That text legitimates Aaron as, right, as a, as a purveyor of Torah. Right.

And then later he’s, he becomes the antagonist in a lot of ways.

Yeah, yeah. But of course, the texts in which he is an antagonist also, and I write about various of these bits in the, in the book also manipulate existing law. Right. So Aaron is wielding Torah. Right.

There you go. I, sorry, go on.

No, he’s, he’s, he’s, even when he’s not mentioned in the text, sometimes he is behind the scenes and you, you can see the same, you know, rhetorical maneuvers that, you know, that fit with like what’s going on in the Korach episode.

I love it. I, I, I, I wish I understood more. I’ll be honest with you. There’s, I, one of the things that, that did happen as I dove into to the book was that I had to text Dan and just say, give me more context for this because I do not have the, I do not have the background to, to really know what I’m looking at for a lot of this stuff. I enjoyed, I enjoyed what I read, but didn’t, but, but, but I always felt like I, you know, I, I was a little, I was a few steps behind. This is not a trade book. This is, this is an academic book. And, and I was, I was like Moses in the reeds. I was, I needed to be taken up and, and swaddled.

Yeah. Well, I am starting up a blog called The Moses Chronicles. So if you, if you visit my website, subscribe. I’m also on Substack The Moses Chronicles. And I’m going—there’s not much there yet, but I’m going to be—for people like you, Dan, right, who this is important stuff and I want to make it available to you in a, in a, in a fashion that’s, that’s digestible and meaningful. So I’m going to be doing that.

Love it. What is your website specifically?

It’s angelaroskoperisman.com. Excellent. Just my name. Simple.

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We are out of time. I’m sure you and Dan could go on for several more episodes worth of worth of time discussing this and I would just be delightfully watching from the wings. But alas, we are done. But you are going to join us for our, our after party for our, our patrons, is that correct?

I am indeed.

Excellent. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much, Angela Roskop Erisman for joining us friends at home. If you would like to hear the after party or if you would like to participate at very least in helping make this show go, you can become a patron of the show over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma where yeah, you can get an early and ad-free version of every episode. You can get the after party. It’s all there available to you. So we invite you to do that. If you want to contact us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Wandering in the Wilderness

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology