Bibliomancy! The Biblical Dance with the Devil?

The likeness of anything that creeps on the ground. The likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. Well, that couldn’t be more clear. Thank you, Bible, for that.

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 go things today, Dan?

Things are good. Things are good. We are, if you’re in our timeline, just about to set out into the second leg of our big tour.

And if you’re in the listener timeline, we’ve gotten home, everything went great. There were definitely no problems flying or anything like that.

No problems with the speakers, no problems with the microphones. No problems with anything.

Everything went great.

So, yeah, we signed some books, we kissed some hands and shake some babies and everything. Everybody enjoyed it a great deal.

You know what that is? That is prophesying. We are prophets.

Well, yeah. And provided everything does work out, then we are true prophets.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is better than a lot of folks can say who, whose work ended up in the Bible. But.

Yeah. Well, speaking of the Bible, how interesting that you brought that up because we’re about it. And one of the—so the first thing we’re going to talk about is we’re going to make you go head to head with one Charles Xavier Kirk. Charlie Kirk.

Charles Tiberius.

That’s right. If you don’t know Charlie Kirk, keep on not knowing him.

Oh, yeah, he’s.

He’s not gonna give you anything that’s worth anything new. But we’re gonna do a Take Issue with Charlie and ethnocentrism. And then in the latter half of the show, we’re gonna do a What Is That? and we’re going to talk about bibliomancy. So get yourself some spooky clothes on and maybe dim the lights and we’ll get all kinds of spooky about it. That’s gonna be a lot of fun. But first, let’s Take Issue. And the thing we’re taking issue with is, you know, there was a video that we found that had Charlie Kirk, and Charlie Kirk, what he does, he loves to go to like, college campuses and then he sits there with a microphone and he puts a microphone up for students to come up and challenge him on stuff. And inevitably he’s loaded for bear.

He has been studying to have these interactions. He knows what he wants to say. And these kids are just kids. You know, this isn’t their field of study. They haven’t been prepping for this. So he gish gallops over them, says a whole bunch of stuff. You know, they think they’re coming in hot. And then he actually has what sounds like pretty good answers for them and they get put in their place. And of course he only releases the video of the ones that he’s happy about. Yeah. So this one, this particular video, he is asked about being a Christian nationalist and specifically about how, you know, the young man that’s asking him the question self-identifies as Christian and says how do you reconcile trying to sort of, as a Christian, trying to take over the levers of power in the government when it seems like Christianity, the word of Jesus, is specifically against that.

So, and Charlie Kirk brings out Jeremiah, Jeremiah 29 , little bullfrog, right?

Out of his pocket. Boom. And he’s drunk though. He had, he had been drinking an—

—of wine. Yeah, he’s helpful in that way.

Yes. He cites Jeremiah 29:7 . And I forget exactly what he says about it. I actually responded to this video a bit ago on TikTok, but I wanted to just further tease out some of the implications of the way he’s approaching these passages and particularly the way he’s giving weight to these passages from the Hebrew Bible and ignoring the New Testament, which is something that the young man brings up in that video. But he gets gished and we’ll get to that because I have, you know, when I was sort of researching the idea of ethnocentrism, yeah, the New Testament seemed to be all anybody was talking about. So it is interesting that he dove directly into the Old Testament and they do seem like they have very different takes.

Well, much of the Old Testament there are some parts of the, of the Hebrew Bible that are more universalistic in, in the scope of their vision. However. Yeah, it’s really with Christianity that you get a theological, well, an additional more, more concerted theological framework for understanding the tearing down kind of these ethnic boundaries. And there are reasons for that. And that’s kind of what I want to discuss is why there’s a difference and, and why we can’t just pick and choose whichever one we want depending on what tradition we’re representing.

But he can too. I can pick and choose as much as I want.

Well, if we’re identifying with a specific tradition and asserting the Bible as an authoritative text.

Right.

Then, you know, if, if you’re going to presuppose univocality and all that kind of stuff, then at least be honest about it and be honest about the fact that you are picking and choosing and negotiating with precisely. Or negotiating with the text that you imagine are all saying the same thing. But he, he appeals to Jeremiah 29:7 . And, and I want to read it in the, from the NRSVue. I don’t remember exactly how he, he said something along the lines of. It was like demand, demand the, the, the welfare of the country that you live in, because in that country’s welfare you will find your welfare. And I remember the first thing I noticed is that it does not say demand. And the idea was that this is a rationalization for Christian nationalism. Well, if I am to demand the welfare, then I must be at the levers of power. I must be taking them over or at least trying to influence them to the degree I am able to, up to and including taking over the government and making it an organ of the Christian church body.

Yeah, the church. And but I want to talk a little bit about what Jeremiah 29 is doing, because in Jeremiah 27 and 28, Jeremiah is engaging with the public. This is the, the Babylonian exile is, is coming up. And these, apparently there are prophets that are saying, oh, this is going to end real quick. This is going to be over with. We’re going to have, there’s going to be peace. Peace, peace and love. And Jeremiah is saying, fools, this is, there’s going to be 70 years. You’re not going to have peace until the 70 years are up. And so in 29:1 it says, these are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. So the exile has already begun. I misremembered that. And thus says Adonai of Hosts, the God of Israel, to the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.

Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce, take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there and do not decrease. And then we get to the verse that, that he paraphrased, but seek the welfare of the city which, where I have sent you into exile and pray to Adonai on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare and then continuing. For thus says Adonai of Hosts, the God of Israel. Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you. And do not listen to your dreams that you dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name. I did not send them, says Adonai. For thus says Adonai, only when Babylon 70 years are completed will I visit you and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. So the message is actually to these exiles. Get comfy.

Because you gonna be there for a while. And so it is, you know, don’t put your bags in the corner and, and not unpack them.

Right.

You are going to need to buckle in.

This is happening.

Hunker down. It’s going to be 70 years. The prophets who are telling you now we’re going to fix this right away are all lying to you. I did not send them. And, and it says pray for the welfare of the city in which I’ve sent you as exiles, because it is in their welfare that you are going to find your welfare. In other words, don’t pray for the city to be destroyed. You’re going to be there for 70 years. And if it’s a pile of rubble, that’s a crappy 70 years to, to be spent in there. So.

Well, and it’s so weird to, to, to take this idea of pray for the place that you’re in that it’s going to do well because if it prospers, you’re going to prosper. Yeah. How do you take that and then turn, flip that around to this means that we should control the government ourselves. Like that is. That’s not even hinted at.

Yeah. And when he, when, when Charlie says it, he, I think he says demand the welfare of the, of the city. But the, the word there in Hebrew is darash, which, which means to seek. Like that’s, that’s not really ambiguous at all. It’s, it’s to seek out. It is, it is not saying you must force the welfare that you want onto the city. It’s, it’s saying seek out. Don’t try to undermine and pray for the. Because the exiles are not in charge. The exiles are not going to become president. They’re not storming the capitol. And so it’s a, it’s a ridiculous misreading of the text. However, there is, I think there is something to be said for the fact that what we have in the exilic and post-exilic literature is rather ethnocentric on the part of the Judahites because they are circling the ethnic wagons, they are hunkering down and they are setting up firm boundaries around their ethnic identity.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I don’t think, because they are a minority ethnic group that is under significant threat.

Right.

Of disintegration, of destruction. And they’re trying to preserve this ethnic identity. And so in order to do that, you have to set up those boundaries and you have to push back against encroachment from the outside. Now that’s not to say that I think in Ezra-Nehemiah we have the, the decree that everybody who married non-Judahite wives had to divorce them and send them away along with their children and all that, because that, that kind of thing is, is a, an extreme example of that trying to preserve those, those ethnic boundaries.

Yeah, but I’m going to push back a little bit because you said it’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I, I think that the extreme examples are the place that those ideologies tend to go like eventually. So often, you know, the group that is, that is the marginalized or the less powerful group, they say, circle the wagons, they say, and that becomes their thing. We are this group. We are isolated. We don’t want to be interfered with and we don’t want to interfere. And then it becomes, and then that becomes like a statement of superiority or a statement of. I don’t know. I think, and I think we see it in other parts of the Bible as well, where, you know, the, the, the Israelites or the Hebrews come out of Egypt and then they, they go and they start just laying waste to all of these other ethnic groups.

Because they have the power to do so. So I don’t, I don’t know. I, I feel like maybe I’m not okay with the idea that, that hunkering down in your ethnicity is. I don’t know, I’m, I’m ill at ease with that idea.

Well, let’s, well, let’s consider it further because. Absolutely, there are ways that it can become incredibly problematic. And I would suggest that it becomes most problematic. It’s not the only way it becomes problematic, but I think it becomes most problematic when the systemic power asymmetries begin to even off or begin to efface. Yeah. And then, and then it gets leveraged as a part of privilege. And this is what Christianity did. Christianity was a marginalized and oppressed group. And they were. And they were certainly circling the wagons. And then they took over the Roman Empire, and then they became the Roman Empire. And at that point, you then have to become aware of the shift in the asymmetries. You’re now on the other end of the stick. And so I think that’s when it becomes dangerous and phenomenally problematic to start to start wielding that identity aggressively and antagonistically.

I think there’s a defensive and there’s an offensive use of this idea of ethnic boundaries. And there are groups that have to defensively use those boundaries. And I think that’s what’s going on for a lot of the Hebrew Bible. But I think there are ways that it goes. It begins to harm other people who are in even less or even more vulnerable positions. For instance, these women and these children who, who, you know, they have married into a Judahite household and that’s the life they know. And now they’re just being shoved out into the street, like.

Right.

That’s incredibly problematic. But if you don’t have that kind–that defensive ethnic identity, then identities get destroyed. And, and I, and I think there’s, there’s a case to make that. That that’s not a great thing.

That, yeah, I, I’m of two minds. Like, bothers me kind of both ways. I, I see problems with, but with, with either thing or, or at least potential issues. It does seem like, you know, if your partic, your ethnic group becomes under. Comes under attack, what else are you going to do but band together? What else are you going to do but circle the wagon? So it totally makes sense.

And a lot of times that identity is, is forced upon folks.

Oh yeah.

By the larger groups who are intentionally like, you get over here. You guys are all one group now. And we’re in charge of, of, you know, your group and, and how you understand yourselves. And so that’s, that’s another example of a way that, that you can have a defensive reification of. Of ethnic boundaries.

And maybe that’s another problem that I have with this whole thing is that like, these boundaries are kind of. They’re just imposed. They’re just made up like somebody. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, just like the concept of race, it’s just something someone came up with at some point. And it’s not that it doesn’t have to be that meaningful, but, but it becomes that meaningful. And when it becomes meaningful and when it becomes really important, it can become deeply problematic. I don’t know. I’m like I’m still grappling with this. I’m not making statements here. I’m just sort of exploring. So. But sorry if I sound weird or if I make a statement that you, you’re ill at ease with. We’re just exploring here.

Yeah, yeah, we’re just, we’re just jamming. And I think the, the Jewish identity is an example of one that down to today has been historically on the receiving end of an awful lot of, of oppression and suppression and antagonism and violence. And, and, and so it’s, I would say it’s, you know, their prerogative to police the boundaries of, of their own ethnic identity, which is one of the things that makes me so uneasy with the ideas about combating anti-Semitism in, in MAGA. Because they’re, they’re not really trying to combat anti-Semitism. They’re, they’re reifying anti-Semitism and really just, just trying to protect their own structures of power and the, the identity politics that serve the interests of white Christian nationalism. And, and you see a lot of tokenizing of, of these identities on, be on the part of Christians who sit at the, the intersection of some of the most privileged and powerful social identities that have ever existed.

And so when somebody like Charlie Kirk appeals to some of the more ethnocentric passages in the Hebrew Bible in an effort to try to validate the most privileged and powerful groups getting to dictate the rules to everybody else, I see that as, as somebody who has entirely swung the wrong way with this.

Right.

They, they have taken something that is, I think, rationalizable in certain circumstances and said, I’m leveraging that for an entirely different set of circumstances where I don’t think it is at all defensible or appropriate in order to say Christians should be thumping their chests and be making the decisions for everybody else.

Well, and that’s one of the points that you make in your, in your social media video is that the, the, the, the circumstances of Jeremiah 7 are not, they’re not analogous to anything that’s happening now.

Like, they’re not analogous to anything in the United States. It’s nothing to do with us. And, and not really. And it, and no good analogy can be made there. You know what I mean? It’s so, so him trying to export that into his own reality is just a non-starter.

Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely wrenching it out of its context and then trying to, you know, impose it into service for an entirely different context. And he gets called out on that by the gentleman with whom he is debating who says well, what about the New Testament? Everything is fulfilled in, in Christ. And, and the point here is, is that the New Testament is not an, an ethnically oriented corpus.

Right.

It is that Christianity is supposed to have transcended those boundaries. It’s supposed to be for everybody.

It is these, this is where we get these ideas of there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, all of that sort of thing.

Yeah, neither male nor female. Galatians 3:28 . And, and yeah, that’s the, that’s the ideal within Christianity. And, and Kirk just sidesteps that entirely because—and, and his response is to say, what, is Genesis 1 less than the New Testament?

Right? Right.

He’s going to subordinate the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament in absolutely every single instance where it serves his interest to do so. And that’s going to be the default. But here when this guy says, hey, wait a minute, we’re not supposed to be thinking of ourselves and our identities and our groups on those terms. And this is, this is where JD Vance’s ignorant appeal to the ordo amoris, where you’re supposed to love the people closest to you and then, and then,

And then the concentric circles.

Of importance, of love.

Yes. And it was such a treat to have the New Pope call him out on that. But, but it’s kind of a similar idea. Ethnocentrism is not appropriate in, in any of these circumstances that the folks who are leveraging this find themselves in. And yeah, especially not Charlie Kirk. Especially not for white Christian nationalists in 21st century America. If you call yourself a Christian and if you claim to be following Jesus, the last thing you should be doing is trying to assert these ethnocentric things and, and appealing exclusively to Hebrew Bible passages to try to do it. I think you, you see a. It’s Deutero-Isaiah, so second Isaiah, Isaiah 40 -55, where you see what a lot of scholars call the universalization of, of Adonai’s purview, kingdom, whatever you want to call it, where now you don’t have to be a part of the, the nation of Judah to enjoy the blessings of Adonai’s bounty.

And this is, this is an ideal. It doesn’t really take root precisely because this is coming at a time when everybody needs to circle the wagons. But the, the idea that this, that, that God’s love, God’s concern, God’s charity extends to all peoples and is not only for the nation of Israel begins in the Hebrew Bible, begins in, in the exilic period. However, you have kind of competing interests because at the same time you have large empires like the Babylonian, like the Persian, like the Hellenistic, like the Roman that are coming down hard on the Judahites and the Judean people and then the Jewish people. And so there’s an effort to kind of say yeah, it’s, it’s for everybody, but hey, wait a minute, we got to take care of ourselves so that we can live through this.

And, and that all of those dynamics are just ignored and he just rides roughshod over all of them. In, in the interest of trying to defend this notion that, that Christianity, this kind of Crusades-style approach to Christianity.

So let’s maybe talk a little bit about what, what else, what the Bible might actually have to say about the interplay between sort of politics and the religion. I mean I, my mind jumps immediately to the sort of, to the render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s sort of idea.

Does that mean what I think it means? And what would we get, what would we say? Since we’re viewing it through the Christological lens, what would we say is Jesus’s message about that?

I think it has to do with the positionality of the authors. Because if we’re talking about the Deuteronomistic literature, these are people who are under the employ of the king. These are people whose paycheck, their, their well-being is directly tied to the well-being of, of the king and, and the king’s household and everything like that. So they’re going to advocate for the interest of the king. And if that means they’re writing legislation so that the king can say, “Oh look what I found in the temple. Oh, look at that. We’ve been doing it all wrong and now we got to change everything. Dang it. Oh man, that really serves my interest, doesn’t it?”

And did you guys know that the Lord writes in my handwriting? That’s crazy.

Yeah. Spells things wrong the same way just, just like me. That’s how they. Every time I, I do the. I grew up learning the “have your cake and eat it too,” in that order. And then on social media, I said it once that way and like the world came crashing down on top of me. As everybody said, it’s “eat your cake and have it too.” Because the order is supposed to be important.

It means literally exactly the same thing. It doesn’t matter what order you do it in. You can’t have both of the things.

There’s. And there are a lot of sayings like that. Like, people are like, I could care less. And they’re like, I think you mean you couldn’t care less. Right. It’s like they both work. They, you know, what, what the sentence. But they, they identified the Unabomber based on the way he used that phrase.

Right.

Evidently. Which is funny. He thinks he’s using it right. But he uses it the way nobody likes to use it. That must be that guy Kaczynski. So I forgot what we were talking about.

We were talking about New Testament. We were talking about the relationship of, of religion, politics and. Politics.

Yeah. And.

And so, because I mean it like one of the things that occurs to me as you were talking about the kings and, you know, being subject to a king is that that’s a very different setup than a, Than, you know, what we’re. Well, yeah, it’s getting less different. I’ll try not to get too political, but it is. But like, that’s a very different thing.

Than, than a democracy.

Yeah. And. And by the time of the New Testament, none of the authors of New Testament texts have any close relationship to the Roman emperor or anything like that. They’re very much on the other end of things. And, and so they’re adversarial. They’re kind of like, yeah, we don’t want to have anything to do with them. In fact, they’re Satan, they’re the, you know, the, the dragon or, or the great whore or whatever. They’re the evil empire. And so we’re. We’re just this plucky little band of, of Jesus followers out here in the wilderness trying to, Trying to get by. And so a lot of it has to do with positionality. And even in the Hebrew Bible you have the prophets. Some of them were, Were probably court prophets like Isaiah, but had an awful lot of bad things to say about, about a lot of the kings. And then you had other prophets who were probably itinerant prophets. They were probably prophets for hire, and they had even worse things to say about the king. And so it, it depends an awful lot on who’s Writing this literature, whether or not they’re supporting the political power structures or are criticizing them.

And by the time you get to the New Testament, it’s pretty unilaterally critical. None of the, none of the folks there are have a lot of political power.

Well, I mean, Jesus himself was essentially an itinerant prophet.

So, so, yeah, he fits into that non king slot.

Yeah. And, and you have, and we’ve talked about Romans 13 , where, where Paul says that all, you know, all this power comes from God. And, and basically he’s just writing to the people in Rome. He thinks Jesus is coming back at any moment. And so he’s like, make it. And, and basically doing the same thing that Jeremiah is doing. Make it easier for yourself. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t. I, I said rock the apple cart in a video one time. And I should have said knock over the boat or something like that just to really annoy people.

But, but that’s putting the, the horse.

Before the cart, the horse before the cookie. Isn’t that what it is? So, so he’s, he’s making a practical exhortation that you just leave them be. Don’t cause too many problems for yourself by, by needling the, the powers that be. So when it comes to how we should be leveraging the Bible for politics today, I mean, it’s a, it’s a dealer’s choice. Everybody’s gonna, gonna do whatever serves their interests. And I think if folks who claim to be followers of Jesus think that the New Testament is inspired and inerrant and has authority over the Hebrew Bible, which they overwhelmingly do, then you got to take that position. That position comes with that, that hierarchy, scriptural hierarchy that you’re asserting. And, and I, and so I think it is disingenuous for them to be like, I’m going to leapfrog right over the Sermon on the Mount and I’m going to get into Ezra, Nehemiah, and that’s where we’re going to be talking about the relationship that we should have with political power and with ethnic identities.

Right. And you know, when, when you have as much power as you. And this was a big deal. We’ve talked about this as well. With the Book of Revelation . When Christianity took over the Roman Empire, a lot of the people who now had the Book of Revelation in their canon were like, huh, I think we won.

We did it?

Yeah. And then they immediately turned to a lot of horrible, horrible things.

And, and it’s been a lot of horrible, horrible things ever since. For the folks, I think, who are most concerned with what Christianity can do for their power.

Right.

And yeah, that’s, oh, there’s a, there’s a. And a lot of people will say, “Well, they’re not real Christians.” I think the history of Christianity kind of makes them the more real Christians than.

Well, and yeah. And also there’s that whole No True Scotsman fallacy, but we don’t need to do that. All right, well, I think, I think that, that’s fascinating. Charlie Kirk should, should hit the bricks or, or hit the books. Hit something.

Yeah. I think he should spend a little more time in the buildings he’s, he’s debating out front of. He went to, he went to Harvard, didn’t he?

Probably. I don’t know. I haven’t done much looking into Charlie Kirk. I, I, I mostly try to avoid the guy as much as.

Yeah, for your own mental health, I think that’s, yeah, that’s a good idea. But I, I think he might have. Yeah. I don’t know if he went there, if he finished a degree or what, but there’s an awful lot of money to be made in, in shilling for right-wing authoritarians right now.

There sure is.

Yeah. Jordan knows that too, so. But that, that’s a story for another day.

Okay, let’s, let’s dive in then to our next, our next topic. It’s a, it’s a. What is that? And the, that, that we’re. What is -mancy-ing today? Everyone get a cauldron out and, and, and you know, some, some sage to burn or something. Because we’re going. Bibliomancy. We’re divining, baby.

Bibliomancy. I don’t know which syllable is supposed to be stressed.

Bib-li-o-man-cy.

So which would, which would be very close to necromancy. Which is consultation with the dead.

Which is, which is prohibited in the Hebrew Bible. Interestingly, it’s not. There are parts of the Hebrew Bible that suggest it may not be fully prohibited. Like there’s a, there’s a part in Deuteronomy where it says when you bring your food offerings to Adonai, make sure none of it was offered to the dead. Which doesn’t say not to. Like if you weren’t supposed to offer anything to the dead anyway, like, you shouldn’t need to add that on there. Yeah, yeah.

It seems it almost sounds like it’s.

Like that food is just for them. That’s just for the dead. Whatever you bring to Adonai can’t. It’s got to be separate.

There’s no double dipping on, on sacrifices. You guys, come on. You can do it to them, you can do it to him, but you can’t do it to both.

Got it? Got to keep them separated, as.

As the great poet once said. And so the, the idea of bibliomancy is consultation with the Bible. It’s a means of divination using the Bible. And, and this was all brought up because I, I stumbled across a video where somebody was. They’re doing a little performance where they had a Bible in their hand, like, “Lord, I really need to know what to do with my life.” And then they slam it down just with their eyes closed, open it to a random page, and then just put their finger down and read, “And he went and hanged himself.” And so it was supposed to be funny, but the, the content creator, their caption was like, “Isn’t it so funny that we literally all do this?” And listen, that’s.

I grew up. All my people did it. That was a thing in the Mormon Church that I was. That I was. Like the people around me. And by the way, I have in front of me a Holy Bible. A Holy Bible.

Is it burning your skin?

If you.

If you steal it from a. Steal a Gideon’s Bible.

If you stay at a hotel, these are free. So I. I’m gonna just launch us on in by doing. By doing a little -mancy myself.

Oh, it’s. It’s Nehemiah. We got into Nehemiah chapter 8. And all the people gathered as one man into the square before—before the Water Gate. It’s about Watergate. Oh, wow. We—okay, that’s. Obviously, I’m supposed to vote for Nixon.

Is what this means.

Well, I—I don’t know when he’s going to be on the ballot again, but—but yeah, you—you have your marching orders.

I guess I was really disappointed when our event in D.C. didn’t end up being at the Watergate Hotel. That was—I think that was one of the possibilities.

But has it been—it’s surely it’s been renovated since then. It can’t be the same layout and everything.

I don’t know. I wanted to break—let’s go break into it.

Because the only—the only—the closest I’ve come to actually knowing what the Watergate looks like is the scene in Forrest Gump when he’s like, “Hey, you got some people over there. Yeah, yeah, they’re using flashlights.”

I remember it from—from All the President’s Men, but whatever. Anyway, not the point. The point is that my bibliomancy gave me nothing.

Nothing helpful anyway.

Nothing helpful anyway. Yeah. And—and what’s funny is that I, you know, I—like in high school, me and all my Mormon friends, we would gather around and do it, and then it was always disappointing.

Because—because the really—the really meaningful scriptures are kind of few and far between. Yeah. There’s a lot of begats in between—all between the good stuff. You know what I mean? I’m gonna do it again. Hang on. Judges, chapter one. Oh, no, wait. What? What? Oh, no, I’m in the end of Joshua. “After these things, Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died, being 110 years old.” Okay, this is not good. This is not helpful for me, Bible.

Hold on a second.

Oh, are you gonna do one?

I’m gonna do one too. Yeah. And like, I—this would be better with a—something digital where you could just say, “Just give me a random verse.” In fact, I’m gonna do that because, like, if I’m flipping through, I know more or less kind of in general where I’ve stopped. Like, I can stop closer to the end and be like, “I want a New Testament verse this time.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I’m sure that if I just go give me a random Bible verse—boom. randombibleverse.net. Okay. “Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.”

Yeah, that’s very clearly a curated list.

That is very clearly—they want—that is going to be New Testament heavy. Okay, I’ll try another one. See how random this is. Generate random verse. I want an actual verse, but Psalms 34:17-20 . “The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth.” And why is everybody using the freaking KJV? “And delivereth them out of all their troubles. The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. Many—” This is also very clearly curated that, like, it’s four specific verses that make—that make a sense unit. So.

And of course, they—they—they chose the KJV because they stole it from the hotel like I did. That’s—I think you’re allowed to. I’m pretty sure that they’re—that you’re allowed to take those.

Okay, I just opened a thing.

The Gideons.

The—oh, really? That—that they’re like, “Take it if you want it.” Yeah. Because they have a lot of—yeah, I’m—

I’m.

They—they seem to think of it as kind of a pastoral thing, as almost a therapeutic thing that they’re providing these Bibles for people who might—in—might be in—in dire straits.

Okay, I’m gonna—I’m gonna hold—hold it on the spine and then just let it fall open.

Okay. It just fell down and the cover closed.

So your verse is “Holy Bible.”

Yeah, the Holy SBL Bible. Okay. Oh, I think I got—I got one. Okay. Second Peter, chapter three, verse 14. “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish.”

Hey, that’s a good one. That wasn’t even a curated one. You got a—you got a good one. Yeah, I got all crap anyway.

Seven tries.

But, you know, here’s the thing. It makes sense because I’m just a dirty, dirty atheist, and you’re the Lord’s beloved, Dan McClellan.

Well, not. Not if you ask my. My compatriots.

I mean, if you ask the New York Times bestseller list, maybe. What about that? Boom.

Sorry, I’m.

You’re putting it away.

Eating up air time. Trying to put my Bible away. Yeah.

You can just put it down next to you and put it away after the show.

How many books I have sitting next.

To me right here.

Like, I don’t have room for much on my.

Just chuck it behind you. It’s fine. Anyway, one of the things that’s interesting about this concept of bibliomancy, I. You know, when I looked it up, I found a lot of places. I found. For instance, you know, I go back to Got Questions, which is that website that. That purports to give.

It’s like Answers in Genesis or something.

Is it? Well, yeah, I don’t. I don’t know who. Who runs it.

Is it.

I think. I think they’re their own thing. Anyway, they had a. They had an article about bibliomancy and one of the things they did do, the joke about Judas went. No, went and hanged himself. And then. But then they were like. And by the way, the Bible, the God’s word, condemns all forms of divination in no uncertain terms. And they. Where to. To support that. They said Deuteronomy 18:10 , which says, There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering. Anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens or a sorcerer. That’s the ESV.

And then they also did a quote. They pulled up.

Because that means to. That’s actually. Okay, continue. They pull up Acts.

Yeah. And.

And where they’re. They’re. They’re casting knuckle bones. Right.

For this is. This is the slave girl. This is Acts 16 verse 16. And it says we were going to a place of prayer. We were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling. And then apparently Paul eventually casts the spirit out of her. And then. Then her owners are mad because they’re not going to get rich from her divinations.

When they have to replace Judas in Acts, they cast lots for it. They gave forth their lots. Yeah. And I’m not sure. Let me look up the Greek term. If the idea is they voted or if they cast lots in the sense of like roll dice. Yeah. For it. And the cast lot. The lot fell upon someone especially marked objects such as a pebble, a piece of pottery or a stick. Used to decide something by lot. It kind of sounds like that might be. Yeah. I’m not sure if the idea there is like drawing straws or what it is because they cast lots for Jesus’s garments as well.

Remember Lot’s wife. I think they might have. The search function might have taken the plural noun. Yeah. But you have a lot of examples of types of divination in the Hebrew Bible and perhaps in the. In the New Testament as well. And there’s. There’s a good kind and a bad kind, because when it comes to Adonai, you have your sanctioned types of. Of casting lots, whether it’s using this Urim ve-Tummim, the, the Urim and Thummim, which the priests were supposed to use to try to divine God’s will and things like that. So there were. There were ways that were approved and there were ways that were not approved. And it seems to me the two main factors were one, who’s on the other end of this? If it’s God, then that’s a strike in your. Or not a strike. That’s. That’s a check mark in your favor. Like it’s.

It’s more likely to be okay if you’re trying to seek the. The will of the God of Israel. And then the other thing is, is the means or the method. If it’s associated with people we hate, then we don’t want to do it. Like that’s what you constantly have in. In Deuteronomy and elsewhere. Don’t worship Adonai using the conventions and the methods that the nations around you are using because that’s, you know, we’ve got our own way to.

We do our own thing.

But there’s also, if I recall, and you can correct me on this if I’m wrong, when we talked about the necromancer on the forest moon of Endor.

We. She.

That her.

Her practice.

Of—of speaking to the dead. Of divining by speaking to the dead. And was effective.

Yep. It worked.

Worked. It had been banished or it had been—it had been prohibited. Prohibited.

But just by that—by that king, it had—was it Saul? I don’t know. And so like, clearly before then, it had not been prohibited. It had been widely practiced. And this person had practiced this before that with sanction.

Yeah. Yeah. And it worked. Yeah, and then it worked. It worked that time as well, although it spooked the necromancer as well. Because—because it was Samuel. Yeah. The idea doesn’t seem to be don’t do it because that’s all hokum and that’s all pretend make-believe stuff. It’s very—

Even that it’s—or even that it’s sin.

Yeah. In and of itself.

Right.

Like there’s—there’s nothing particularly considered bad about the practice in and of itself. It’s the circumstances, it’s the target of it. It’s whether or not the actual conventions are okay or not. And so you have a lot of people today who I see all the time on social media, people getting upset about witchcraft. Yeah, but what’s the difference between, you know, the knuckle bones or whatever the crone in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves does, and then the lady who just makes your breakfast in Robin Hood: Men in Tights and some dude closing his eyes and opening up the Bible and slapping his finger down on a passage.

Right.

Both of them are based on the idea that the universe is just chock-full of these divine forces and God’s will or the future or whatever is just inscribed all over it. And so whether it’s by reading a particular passage in the Bible, they’re still conceptualizing this Bible as a piece of material media that transmits or channels God’s will or agency or power or even presence. And so whether someone uses the Bible to try to divine, you know, a path for their life, or in an effort to try to feel God’s spirit, commune with the holy or whatever. They’re treating the Bible like a divine image.

Right.

Which—and there’s quite a bit of overlap in divination and divine imagery. A lot of people think of a divine image as just an object of worship, but it really was there to facilitate the presence of the deity for whatever required the presence of the deity, whether that was consultation—so divination—or that was worship or that was what have you, even, you know, the trying to communicate back and forth, trying to feed the deity or whatever. There were a lot of different functions that used this divine image. And because Christianity has sworn off all of the material media of worship except for the Bible, that kind of is the grab bag that has collected all of the—all of the different means of interacting with deity have all been subsumed within that single piece of material media.

And an awful lot of people treat it like it is something divine, something that is superhuman.

Well, I mean, so there’s another angle to it that—that’s sort of when you think of it in a supernatural way, in a divine imagery sort of way. And by the way, I will point out that when I was sort of Googling this and when I was researching it a little bit, I found a Reddit post that was somebody asking about divination in the Bible. And somebody—the first answer on the Reddit thing mentioned a—you said divine images. It mentions a book called Adonai’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach. So I thought that that was interesting by some weirdo. I don’t know, it’s probably not trustworthy anyway. But the other thing is that a lot of forms of divination—and I think now of like Tarot cards, I know plenty of people who are—who have gotten very into Tarot as a thing, but not because of the actual like any kind of mystical belief about the deck or about something magical is going to happen, but rather just as a way of sort of saying, “Hey, does this gel with me?”

Let’s—as a way of sort of priming the brain to think slightly differently about their situation or to refocus themselves. And okay, so I, in that sense, I think grab a book. It doesn’t have to be, you know, the Bible. Yeah, but there’s no reason why as long as you’re not thinking that you’re going to, you know, get some sort of magical answer to your life’s questions.

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s how a lot of a lot of art and a lot of what you might refer to as ritual practice is there to kind of get the get the juices flowing out of the box a little bit and and provide cues that might help you figure things out.

So like and there’s a there’s a funny story. You know the song Chop Suey by System of a Down?

Wake up.

I don’t. I don’t know.

Yeah, so there.

I don’t know any of the lyrics. I’ve never understood a word of it, but yes, so wake up and makeup.

Yeah, there’s there’s a funny story where Serj Tankian, who’s the the lead singer, he was I think the producer was Rick Rubin, and they were in his library or studio or office or whatever trying to figure out how to fill a lyric to put in a in a space. And Rick was like, hey, grab a book off the shelf and open it up and just see what we come up with. And it was a Bible.

And he opened it up and slapped his finger down on a verse and it said, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. And that is what is in the song now. And it was considered they they were like, this is inspired. But but like and that what they were just doing that. They were just like, let’s let’s just kind of, you know, it’s it’s not even a brainstorming thing. It was just kind of a throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what picture it makes kind of thing.

And so sometimes that’s all you need to get your know, the creative, the thinking juices flowing.

Yeah, and a lot of people use prayer that way. Prayer is is a way to just kind of center yourself and focus on what’s what’s important, what do we need, what are we grateful for as a way of just trying to take stock of your day and and keep a larger, broader perspective. And so and there are a lot of people who do that. It’s very it’s not incredibly different from meditation. No.

As a matter of fact, I, as an atheist have you know, when I talk to people who are deconstructing and they’re they’re feeling sort of untethered, and they don’t even know if they believe in God anymore, but but they have a deep connection to a lot of these rituals. I tell them, look, pray, there’s no reason not to. And it doesn’t have to be to it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be the same thing that you were doing before. But it’s such a useful practice or can be. And and if that’s and so if it serves you to help you focus yourself and to help you understand what questions you’re are really present in your mind, I think it’s a great idea.

You know, it’s funny because a lot of people I’m so, I’m personally so like such a literal thinker and I’m not someone who appreciates magical thinking. I think it’s dangerous. I don’t like it at all. So when I go, when, you know, when I see someone who, who’s talked about, who’s talked to a psychic or a medium or whatever, and they were like, oh my gosh, they were so, so dead on or whatever. Yeah, you as someone who’s studied cognitive sciences. Yeah, you, you’re aware that like one of the things our brains do really well is ignore all of the all of the things that went wrong and just focus on the things that go right. And so it’s like this, there’s something to these practices that’s actually, that could be actually great and useful as long as we don’t try to ascribe too much power to them or pretend like they’re somehow magical in ways that they probably aren’t.

And I think one of the reasons that they persevere, there’s an awful lot of well, we’re much closer to answers now. But a big question for a long, long time in anthropology and sociology and in the study of religion was why it perseveres. And there are one of the ideas is that well, the main idea is that it perseveres because it serves all these social functions related to prosociality and stuff like that. But rituals are associated with religion and also non-religion, non-religious social practices as well. But there’s a theory that you have a couple of different types of ritual. You have kind of a spectrum. On one end is what’s called imagistic ritual, and on the other end is called doctrinal ritual. And the imagistic ritual tends to be less frequent and it tends to be what they call high arousal, meaning it’s, it’s intense.

The reciting of creeds or something.

Yeah. And so there’s all this fascinating research into when and why imagistic versus doctrinal rituals will become more prominent or become less prominent. And a lot of it has to do with, like, the imagistic rituals tend to, to serve the interests of the individuals because they’re more intense and they generate this collective effervescence that Durkheim referred to where people are doing something together and that creates this sense of bonding.

Would that be—would an example of that be sort of like when someone goes into an ecstatic state in a sort of Pentecostal revival sort of?

Yeah, absolutely. Like speaking in tongues. When everybody’s dancing or singing or chanting, things like that. That’s an example of that. Usually, they—and it goes beyond Christianity, you know—the fire walking and that kind of stuff. Yeah, certain kinds of like self-flagellation. Certain things that are rites of passage for young men or young women that can be painful and things like that. Those are examples of those high arousal rituals. But the, like, institutions frequently want to increase the doctrinal rituals because they are more useful as identity markers and they also facilitate the greater saturation of this authoritative knowledge. That’s why they’re called doctrinal.

And so which can provide a cohesion to the group, and—but.

They tend to be more boring. And so you get a kind of give and take and ebb and flow. And Mormonism is fascinating because—

Because it’s all boring.

Well yeah, but it takes, like, the temple ritual would be an example of an imagistic thing.

Right.

Which only—it’s, it only happens once. But Mormons found a way to make it repetitive and make it something that you do a bunch and all. And yes, make it—make it boring. And so that’s, I’ve always wanted to—

You can take shots at them all you want. I shouldn’t take shots.

I’ve wanted to talk to some of the thought leaders in that ritual studies field and be like, “Look into—”

Temple worship and Mormons. Yeah.

Because it’s such an interesting combination of the two different types of ritual. But when it comes to things like prayer and meditation and some of these things that people do, there are reasons that these things persevere. It serves important functions for people’s ability to identify with a group and feel connected to that group and also to kind of advance their own needs and their own interests. And so I think there’s a reason that those are some of the things that are most widespread across the different religious landscapes rather than being something that, you know, you only find in one religion.

So I think what we’re saying is you’re allowed to just point at a part of a book and read whatever you want to.

I have not seen anybody struck by lightning because of that yet. And regardless—

Of what GotQuestions says, and even—

The folks who wag the finger at that, I think they’re less concerned about that than they are about—

Right.

—everything else.

And so even though it is something that we could say, you know, there are parts of the Bible that say don’t do that, we could also say there are other parts of the Bible that seem kind of on the fence about it.

Right. But yeah, or they even promote it in some way.

Yeah. But use it as a party trick.

Have fun with it.

Sure, yeah.

If you let us know if you come up with something interesting.

But it is, it is a—

Ask… I’m going to—I’ll ask one final question.

Instead I’m going to ask a question rather than just point at a thing. Okay. So the question is, are we correct that the second leg of the Data over Dogma tour will have gone swimmingly well by the time this episode airs. The likeness of anything that creeps on the ground. The likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. Well, that couldn’t be more clear. Thank you Bible for that.

You’ve been so helpful.

So helpful. Well, that’s it for the show today. If you would like to help support us as we creep on the ground and swim in the, in the sea or whatever the. That verse just said, you can become one of our patrons and that’s our favorite thing for you to do. Just go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma or do a search for Data over Dogma in there. You can sign up to be our patron. You choose at what level and then you can get, you can get access to an early and ad free version of every show and the after party, which is bonus content every week. And you know, our patrons find out first about events that we’re doing and all that sort of thing things. So please feel free to go over there if you can’t afford to do that. You can still afford to give us five stars on whatever app you’re listening to us on, and that would be great and helpful. Go subscribe on all of the platforms, the YouTube or the whatever, and that just bumps our our thing and Interact and all the things.

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Bye everybody.

Bibliomancy! The Biblical Dance with the Devil?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology