Did the Bible Steal Its Stories?

This seems like something that was just appropriated.

Right.

By the psalmist, the worshipers of Adonai, who were like, “I like the sound of that. Why don’t you shove that in your bag real quick?”

Right, right. Let me just cross out the word Baal here. Yeah, we’ll just add—we’ll just say Lord. That’ll be fine.

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 are things today, Dan? Apart from feeling like crap?

I—I am fighting a cold, which is not fair because the weather is warm, and that’s not how that’s supposed to go.

No, but I’m—

I’m feeling great. Otherwise in good spirits mostly. We—we got—we just got back from our—our tour. Yes, that in—in—in listener time, that was weeks ago, but yes, in our time, we just barely got back.

Yeah, just a few days ago, I flew back from D.C. You—you trained on to—to New York for an art gallery.

Oh, yeah.

And then the Met.

The Met has an extraordinary, uh, John Singer Sargent special collection going right now. Highly recommend it. Very, very good. But yeah, we—we got to meet all kinds of people. We met several of the listeners to this very show.

And that was—what a treat that was for us.

It was definitely wonderful to get out on the road to—to meet some of y’all, to hear your stories and to get to sign some of these books and enjoy each other’s company for a while. It was a great time. So thank you to every single one of y’all who came out to see us and to hear us and in various ways, figuratively and literally.

We’re sorry it was terrible, but—but we had a good time.

Most of the jokes landed, and if they didn’t, we just moved right on ahead.

Right, right. Absolutely. Yeah. So we got—we should probably do a show, I guess.

If we—if we must.

If we want—if we want to have a show, we should do a show. So let’s—we’re going to do two different segments as we usually do. The first one, we’re going to be taking issue. And the issue we’re going to be taking is—is mythological in nature. We almost called it Good Mythical Evening as an homage to our two friends of the show, Rhett and—and his friend Link. Link, we haven’t met, but we met Rhett and he is great.

But I used to play the video game Zelda all the time when I was a kid. So that—that’s Link, isn’t it?

Yes, I think.

Is the character. Okay, yeah.

Anywho,

That’s neither here nor there.

We’re off on—on all kinds of tangents, but Rhett and Link are—anyway, but what we’re going to be talking about is mythological in nature, or rather is stories in nature. And we’re going to talk about how stories come from, how they may have been transmitted into—into the Bible from various external sources. And that’s exciting and interesting. And then in the second half of the show, we’re going to do a chapter and verse and we’re going to talk about Haggai, the book of Haggai . And I read the whole thing a couple times and will require your assistance in knowing why I read those things. So that’ll be great. But I actually am excited about it. I’m looking forward to learning about the second year of Darius. But first, let’s take issue.

And the issue that we’re taking, as I said, is—is with the notion, I suppose, that the Hebrew Bible, that the Bible in general is only stories that erupted of their own accord or that became or that are stories that belonged exclusively to the Israelites, the Judahites, etc. Yeah, it’s different than that. And this might not be great for some people. Some people might not be happy about this one.

Yeah, this is—this is an accusation you hear an awful lot from people who are critical of the Bible. They’ll say, “Oh, the Bible stole the story of the flood from, you know, Atrahasis,” or they stole the creation account from—from this, that or the other, from the Enuma Elish. And—and there are other folks who say, “No, no, these are, you know, you find them in different cultures just because they’re true and they really happen. And so everybody has a version of this story.”

Or of course, of course there would be a. There would be other writings about a global flood. Never mind the fact that only one guy survived, all the other people, of course they would have writings about it.

So. So you have two sides to this, this argument about where a lot of these mythological traditions come from. And I think there are three main positions. One is that these are, you know, the accounts that we have in the Bible are verbatim accounts. They are literal, they are historical, and they either originate with or have not been at all altered by the biblical authors. So the authors from ancient Israel, ancient Judah. The other is that the authors of the Bible were just rummaging around through the pockets of their neighbors after they beat them up and stole these stories from them.

Right. And the third. So somehow in, in a nefarious attempt to subsume the other cultures and like, like a, like, what was that old. That video game where you roll the thing and it gathers all of the detritus in the world and the ball gets bigger and bigger?

Man, I, I don’t know what tax bracket you were playing video games in as a kid, but I recognize that.

No, yeah. There are a few of our listeners who are going crazy screaming the name of a, Of a. I want to say Tamagotchi, but that’s the wrong thing. So I don’t. It’s. I think it’s different. Anyway, anyway, some, a bunch of people know it and love it anyway.

No doubt.

And then the third position is that these are stories that are in the Bible because the Bible shares an ideological and ethnic, a cultural background with many of the nations around them. In other words, they’re just drawing from a shared literary and mythological inventory or matrix. In other words, it’s just. It was in the air and in these nations. And so this is just the Israelite or the Judahite version of this kind of generic thing that was just around. So it’s not that it was stolen. It was just one version of one of these kind of more generic stories.

Yeah, maybe as a bit of sort of set dressing for this, to sort of set the scene for this. Let’s talk a little bit about how. Because, you know, we have these stories because someone wrote them down. Yes, but was the, was the sort of surrounding area. Was, was this generalized area and period? I mean, and we’re talking a period of probably what, a thousand years for the Hebrew Bible? 800 years, give or take.

Yeah, about a thousand to eleven hundred years, if you go from the earliest poetic fragments down to the book of Daniel .

Okay, so. So, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot there, but it, it occurs to me that there would have been a lot of oral tradition as well as just written tradition.

Absolutely. There would have definitely been oral tradition. And this is why I think you have. And, and this is something I talked about in another video that I, that I posted on my channels a few days ago, where we don’t really. We can’t really speak about what’s. What’s known as an urtext, a base text, an original autograph text of books like Genesis and Deuteronomy and Isaiah and the majority of the books in the Hebrew Bible and even some New Testament books. Because the, what we know as the book of Genesis has come together over numerous centuries as different traditions were brought together and woven into a single narrative. And many of those would have been in circulation as oral traditions. And who knows how many times different people wrote them down and how many times those written down versions may have collided with each other and then been woven together and then collided with another version or something like that. Like, we, we don’t know the, the background of the transmission, oral and textual, of all of these traditions, but we know it’s probably pretty complex.

And this results in things like, you know, the story of Abraham coming into, I think it was Gerar and telling the king, oh, this is, this isn’t my wife, it’s my sister, I promise. And then God gets angry with the king for, for making a move on Abraham’s wife. Like that story happens twice and, and separate from each other, right? And, and then you’ve got stories like the two creation accounts where they’re just abutted one after the other. And then you’ve got stories like Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt, where they have taken two complete narratives and basically stitched them together. And then you’ve got other things where they are supplementing one story with another or they’re weaving things together in different ways.

There you go. Flat circle, everybody.

Buddy. But what I would like to talk about is where these come from. Are these original to the nations of Israel and Judah? Are they from the shared heritage that Israel and Judah has had with other nations around them? And, and this is a big, this is a point that a lot of people don’t know about. Most scholars these days would say that the nations of Israel and Judah are Canaanite, that the Bible is just the records of a group of Canaanite tribes that just at one point began to distinguish themselves more, more aggressively from the other nations that were around them. And really they’re all based on, you know, the same kind of ethnic roots. And this is why we find some of the stories in the Hebrew Bible that maybe we find in the Ugaritic literature or that maybe we, we find in, in other texts or traditions or rituals that come from the nations around ancient Israel.

Was, were the Ugaritic people also considered Canaanite?

They would, they. I think they would have been labeled Canaanite had they been around when the Bible was being written. But the city of Ugarit was destroyed somewhere around 1200 BCE so just that’s like right around the time Israel begins to be a thing. And so they wouldn’t have been known about really. However, we do have preserved and, and I guess this is one of the first things we can talk about. Some people have pointed to Leviathan as something that seems to have been snaked from other traditions. Pun definitely intended because Leviathan is a serpent-like creature, seven-headed serpent, dragon thing.

That’s the worst kind. What you, you give me a seven-tailed serpent, I’m feeling fine about it.

Seven-legged.

I mean, yeah, sure, absolutely. It’s the head that, that’s all the, that’s the problem when you come. When it comes to a serpent, seven.

Eyes I can deal. But, but so Leviathan, you have a seven-headed serpent. We, well we have in Psalms 74 there’s a reference to Adonai crushing the heads, plural, of Leviathan. And so this seems to reference this multi-headed serpent entity. But we have a more direct connection to the mythologies of other civilizations around ancient Israel and Judah. And I think we’ve talked about it before on the channel. And that would be Isaiah 27:1 which is an. It’s about the eschaton, the end times. And it says in that day Adonai will visit punishment with his hard and great and strong sword upon Leviathan the wriggling serpent, and upon Leviathan the writhing serpent. And he will kill the monster ha-tannin the dragon, whatever that is in the sea. And so this is. If this is original to the actual prophet Isaiah then this dates to somewhere in the late 8th century BCE.

And there’s a text from the Ugaritic literature, part of the Baal cycle, KTU 1.5 I, lines 1 through 3, where there’s praise that is being directed at Baal. The Northwest Semitic storm deity says and it refers to when you struck Loton or Litan, depending on how you vocalize it. The wriggling serpent, you finished off the writhing serpent, the powerful one with seven heads. And so the, the words that I’ve rendered, and these are my translations of both Isaiah and, and this Ugaritic text. But the words I’ve translated wriggling and writhing are direct cognates. There it’s, it’s one in, in Ugaritic and it is the same word in Hebrew. Litan or Loton is cognate with Leviathan.

Right.

The difference is the powerful one with seven heads or the potentate with seven heads is different from the, the dragon that is in the sea. However, this was still a dragon, this was still associated with the sea. And as we’ve seen in Psalms 74 , they had more than one head. Leviathan had multiple heads. And so it’s pretty safe to conclude that this was a seven-headed sea monster that the Bible is talking about. But this is in a text that was written in Ugaritic, a language that nobody who wrote anything in the Bible probably ever really knew about. And it was written five or six hundred years before.

Right.

The book of Isaiah was written. So it’s very, very unlikely that an author was like, hey, I was up north in Syria and I dug up this text and then I happened to decipher the language and I’m just going to quote this.

And so interesting that those, that those adjectives would make it through the, the, this is the wriggling and the writhing serpent that like, I want, I like that those markers seem so specific. It’s fascinating that that has made it through the centuries, through the languages, like across, across all of these boundaries and borders and, and just, and that’s been preserved the whole time.

Yeah, well, and I, I think it was the, the idea, it’s very short. It’s probably just this motif that was just shared widely, you know, and you know, as Latter-day Saints we, we, we have this saying about with all your heart, might, mind and strength. And that’s something that, you know, kind of takes on a life of its own a lot. And, and there are a lot of sayings from the Bible that people just use without knowing they’re from the Bible.

Right.

By the skin of his teeth, for instance, is from the Bible. But people use that all the time and, and it becomes a little kind of tiny little motif that just has its own circulation and its own life. So I imagine this, this idea that there was some chaotic seven-headed sea dragon that was a wriggling serpent and a writhing serpent and had seven heads. And it was the responsibility of the storm deity to defeat. It was just something that was around in circulation.

And so that’s. That’s an example of something where I would say it’s unlikely that this could be referred to as stolen. This is not something where they were, like, maliciously were like, I’m taking this. This. This seems to be something that was just a part of their tradition because they grew out of an ethnic and a literary stock where this was just, you know, in the air. It was part of their literary and their mythological heritage.

Well, and it occurs to me that stories like these, that. That the. The mythos of a region would cross boundaries, wouldn’t. Wouldn’t need to stick in its own. With its own people would have a larger scope as people tell. Relate these stories to their friends and neighbors. And then they tie. You know, they. Someone goes traveling and relates the story on their travels, and then they’re like, oh, that’s a cool story. I’m gonna tell my friends that. And it just, you know, like. Yeah, it seems very easy for stories like that to transmit their way through various populations and just sort of ebb and flow and move and change and. And just become part of. And then, you know, if it’s retold enough times, it’s now part of your local lore.

Yeah. And. And at which point, ownership is kind of a. You know, to the degree you can talk about ownership as kind of a moot point.

Right. But.

And there’s a. There’s another one I want to talk about that is similar because it’s. It’s about the storm deity still, but this time it probably is an example of someone stealing something from cultures. So this is Psalms 29 . And I think we’ve probably referenced this psalm once or twice on. On the show before, but this is where the psalmist is singing praises to Adonai, and they’re singing praises to the voice of Adonai, Qol Adonai. And there are. It’s a sevenfold praise thing where you have seven different ways that that God’s voice is spectacular. And all of the imagery has to do with storm deity imagery. So the voice. So the Qol Adonai is over the waters. The God of glory thunders Adonai over mighty waters. The. The Qol Adonai is powerful. The Qol Adonai is full of majesty. Breaks the cedars, Breaks the cedars of Lebanon.

Makes Lebanon skip like a calf. And Sirion, like a young wild ox, flashes forth flames of fire, shakes the wilderness. Shakes the wilderness of Kadesh, causes the oaks to whirl and strips the forest bare. And. And so you’ve got the sevenfold praise of a storm deity, and particularly the voice of the storm deity, which is likened to. To thunder and lightning. But the weird thing is it mentions several toponyms. Some. Several place names.

Lebanon, Sirion, Kadesh, all of them north of Israel, in the territory of another storm deity, specifically Baal. So a lot of scholars are like, huh, isn’t that peculiar?

That does seem very strange.

Yes. It seems like the kind of poem that might originally have been dedicated to the storm deity who actually occupied that region and was worshiped in Kadesh and in Sirion and in Lebanon. In other words, this seems like something that was just appropriated, right, by the psalmist, the worshipers of Adonai, who were like, like the sound of that. Why don’t you shove that in your bag real quick?

Right, right. Let me just cross out the word Baal here. Yeah. I will just add. I’ll. We’ll just say Lord. That’ll be fine.

And so instead of the qol Baal, we have the qol Adonai. And this is a. And. And then that becomes one of the very cool little mythological pieces of poetry that we find in the Psalms. And I love how it starts. Verse one says, ascribe to Adonai, sons of the gods, ascribe to Adonai glory and strength. So it’s. It’s being sung to other gods as well, which I think is. Is wonderful. And Bene Elim is the word for sons of gods. And elim is. Is the more basic plural of the Hebrew noun El, which means deity. And. But you have.

We. I’ve heard you. You use the phrase Bene Elohim.

Yeah. Bene Elohim is. Is more common in, like, Genesis 6 and Job and places like that.

Okay. But this would mean roughly the same thing.

Roughly the same thing, although more clearly plural, because Bene Elohim, you could interpret that to mean children of the God.

Namely the. The one head deity. But Elim is. Is definitely plural. This is not a singular noun. This is a plural noun. So it’s sons of gods. And, you know, when you look in, like, the King James Version, I think it says sons of the mighty. That what it says. Yeah. Give unto the Lord, oh, ye mighty. Which is. Yeah. Which is a pretty slippery way to get out of acknowledging what’s really going on here.

Yeah. NRSVUE has ascribed to the Lord, O heavenly beings.

Yeah. And you’ll notice there’s a footnote there that says Hebrew sons of Gods.

There you go. Okay.

But I’m curious about. There are some other translations that, that can get a little squishy when it comes to this kind of thing. I’m curious where the. Oh, man. Where are all my, my translations? I’m curious what the NIV and the ESV and those.

You go NIV, I’ll go ESV.

Okay. What? Looking for the NIV. I have the ASV. The American Standard Version says, oh, ye sons of the mighty.

Okay. ESV has oh heavenly beings.

Oh, heavenly. Which is, which is. I think that’s a silly way to talk around it. Like it says gods, Heavenly beings is. Just means you’re. You’re too chicken to say God.

Right. Well, and, and the ESV also has the same footnote. Hebrew sons of God or sons of. Well, no, their footnote is a little sneaky. Sons of God singular or sons of might. Interesting.

Yeah. And this is based on a very outdated etymology for the word El. There, there one, one etymology is that this comes from a verbal root that means to be mighty or powerful. Now this has been largely rejected for 70 years or so. There was a, there was a scholar named Marvin Pope back in 1955 who wrote a book, published a book on El in the Ugaritic texts. And what he points out is that the word ilu or El, the Northwest Semitic and Hebrew word for God, is etymologically irreducible. You cannot evaluate it any further than that. It just means deity or God. It’s just a basic noun that means God or deity. So, yeah, the, the ESV is appealing to some very outdated scholarship. So I, but we digress a bit, but it’s still. I, I think it’s a fascinating psalm that was likely borrowed. If we’re being kind swiped, if we’re not being so kind, from praise that was probably directed at Baal, the Northwest Semitic storm deity.

Interesting.

So that’s an example of one where I would say, yeah, we could probably say the author is stealing that, that from the nation around them.

And so we’ve got other examples, I think, of things that are being borrowed and they’re being like, responded to. So for instance, Genesis 1 , the creation account. In Genesis 1 , you’ve got the seven creative periods. A lot of people have, have noticed some resonances with the ways that the creation is described in Enuma Elish. And there, it’s not like, you know, the, the Judahites are in Babylon or have just come back from Babylon when this is being written.

Right?

If, if people are like, oh, that sounds, that sounds a little familiar, but it’s going in a different direction, that’s still going to allow it to gain a little purchase and allow it to spread a little more within this, this literary context into which it is proliferating. And so you, you probably have Tehom is the Hebrew word that is for the deep or the abyss. And this is probably cognate with Tiamat, the Akkadian chaos monster who is split in two by Marduk. And half of the body becomes the heavens, the other half becomes the earth. And what happens in Genesis 1 ? The depths, the waters, the tehom are split in two. And then there’s a dome that holds up the waters above, and then the dry land is able to appear as though the depths recede. And so it’s not the exact same thing, but there’s just as, just enough of a vibe for people to be like, I, I’m picking up what you’re putting down.

Yeah, it’s not unlike when, when pedellers of, of New Age ideas use quantum physics talk, quantum physics words to sort of say, hey, look at, yeah, look at the vibrational blah, blah, blah, and, and then, and, and then get all of the quantum physics wrong. But boy, does it make it sound.

Sciency or, and, and you see, apologists do the same thing when they try to appropriate the methods and the theories of critical scholarship and, and science, right. In order to try to, to prop up their own apologetic ends. You know, they’ll, they’ll be like, well, you go dendrochronology when you look at the global flood. And you know, so yeah, if you’ve.

Ever been anyone who like me has been to any of Ken Ham’s establishments, including the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, you see so much. And it, it always baffles me, I’m mystified by it. But so much really smart science talk.

To explain the flood and to prove that the, you know, the Grand Canyon is there because the flood carved it out, and here’s why we know that and blah blah, blah. And it’s actually really, so much, really good effort went into that and it’s like. Yeah, but the rest of, like the thing that we do with science is we make sure that all of the scientists are, you know, the scientific literature as a whole is taken into account. And then fringe things are usually basically easy to sort of shunt aside. And, and so why bother even using the science talk? Just don’t use it. You can just say the words miracle and be done. You don’t have to, you don’t have to pretend like this is in the realm of science.

But I, and I think that’s an example of, of engaging with the authoritative knowledge and demonstrating the engagement by using the words. Yeah, but really what you’re trying to do is tell a different story.

Right?

And so I think with like Genesis 1 , that’s probably what’s going on there. Rather than them being like, we’re too dumb to come up with our own thing, let’s just steal their thing.

Like, right.

The, the, the folks who think of the Bible as, you know, the, the scratchings of Bronze Age goat herders have absolutely no clue what they’re talking about. These were some of the most well trained and the most intelligent and the most sophisticated writers of this time and place.

Right.

And they’re, they’re engaging with the literature around them. Not because they’re, they’re thieves, but because that’s what you did when you wanted to try to challenge the dominant narrative. You had to engage it and show you could engage it while telling your own story so well.

And also there’s this sense of, you know, like we were talking about before, this is the, these ideas in these stories are not owned by one group. They are, they are proliferated. Yeah. And so, so, yeah, it’s, it isn’t a matter of theft. You can’t steal something that belongs to everyone. You can just, you can just, you know, write it your way and see. And see how people, how people glom onto it. Or.

Yeah, it would be like a kid growing up today and going off and creating his own comic book where it’s a superhero who flies and has a cape, but has, you know, totally unique powers and a totally unique name and all this kind of stuff and somebody else being like, well, you can see that this is stolen from, from Superman because he flies and has a cape and so obvious.

I mean, they could come up with it just from watching the T shirts on your channel.

I mean, you’re gonna see some Superman, though. That’s. Well, yes, there’s nothing I can do about that. That’s just comes with the territory. But I. And I just want to share one real quick. One other example. This one is a fascinating one of. In Proverbs. Proverbs 22 and 23. Proverbs is wisdom literature. We’ve talked about wisdom literature an awful lot. This is, you know, people just waxing wisdomly, I guess, about. About how to live a good life. About how to proverbially waxing, I guess, proverbially. Yes, those are big words. But anyway, in Proverbs 22 and 23, you have a bunch of references. Don’t move an ancient boundary stone, or encroach on the fields of the fatherless. For instance, don’t rob the poor because they are poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate. Incline your ear, hear the words of the wise, for it will be pleasant if you keep them within you.

And a lot of scholars have noted, hey, a lot of this sounds an awful lot like this Egyptian wisdom text from several hundred years before the Instruction of Amenemope, who is not a. A creature that lives in the sea. Okay, but is a dude’s name.

I’m just gonna say, don’t try to steal the thunder of the goofball name thing, because that’s the second half of the show.

But. But this is probably an example where there is probably some direct influence where the person who is responsible for collating or compiling or writing these Proverbs was probably inspired by some of these other texts that they knew about that were written in Egypt many centuries before, but were still in circulation around the Persian period. And, you know, whether it was writer’s block and they were just like, well, I’ll just take some of Amenemope’s stuff. He’s not going to know. Or, or if, you know, this was just kind of, again, had become embedded in their. Their kind of literary psyche or matrix or whatever.

Right?

It’s not clear, but there does seem to be some kind of literary influence from these Egyptian texts. So it comes from far away and there. And, you know, like Psalms 104 seems to have some sun God imagery that a lot of scholars would suggest is. Is taken from a hymn of praise to Aten the sun deity during the reign of Akhenaten. So there’s an awful lot of that. You can find it sprinkled throughout the Hebrew Bible where there is inspiration, where there. It’s, it’s either from a shared sociocultural matrix or it’s engaging with these traditions in order to try to one up them or build upon them. Or it’s just straight up stealing.

From, from the, the nations that are around them. And it helps if what you’re stealing is a hymn of praise to a Northwest Semitic storm deity. Because Adonai is a Northwest Semitic storm deity. I mean, the, the story we haven’t talked about is how the deity themselves, Adonai, the God of Israel, seems to be taken from the divine profile of the existing Northwest Semitic storm deity. So that’s kind of. Maybe that was the elephant in the room the whole time. The deity themselves seems to be based on somebody else’s divine profile. But the, the notion that the Bible is just all just pure ex nihilo Israelite tradition, that this is, this is something that was revealed to these authors who had no other influences whatsoever, that’s just pure and utter nonsense. They’re very clearly aware of engaging with and in some cases, apparently swiping the literature from the nations around them.

Swiping left on or swiping left.

Well, I was going to say I was going to go the, the kids route and do a Swiper no swiping, but you know, that’s, that’s Dora the Explorer for, for those who don’t have, don’t have the kids running.

Yeah, I didn’t catch it. All right, well, that’s, I think that that’s a, a great way to look at the. Yeah, it’s great.

Way to muddy the waters a bit. Well, no, it’s a little of all of it.

It’s such a better viewpoint than, than the, either the, ah, they’re stealing and therefore it’s all stupid or the, it’s all perfect and, you know, and therefore.

You stole it from us.

You’re not allowed to ever question it and blah, blah, blah. Like, it’s just, it’s just such a better way of viewing the world.

So that’s, that’s what a lot of early Christians did. They were like, Plato was trained by Moses. You know, they, it resonated so well that they were like, I think they might have taken this from us.

So that’s amazing. That’s amazing. All right, well, let’s move on to chapter and verse. And our chapter and verse today is Haggai. The entire book. Yes, it’s chapters and verses.

Or we could just say book—the book.

Yes, yes. And Haggai. Okay. I think I said this at the top of the show. I read it multiple times. I’m… I’m interested as to… Oh, what’s that?

Baffled.

But, well, I’m interested into why you wanted to talk about it. Because when I read it, it seemed like it said in 300 sentences what I could say in four.

Which is like the first… I’ll just do a quick summary. And then the, the Dan version, which I think the, the DBV will be, would be a much shorter Bible. And I think we could all look forward to that. But the Dan Beecher version is Haggai 1 is, hey, you guys should build a temple again. And Haggai 2 is, hey, your… your temple looks like crap. Do better. Did I do it?

Like, those are the, those are the, the main… like that. Yeah. Those are the things that… that the whole narrative pivots on, more or less.

But I will say this. One of the things that interested me was that I somehow accidentally, when I first… when I, when I was first looking at this, I clicked on the wrong book. I didn’t click on Haggai. I accidentally clicked on Zechariah, which is the book directly after Haggai.

And more interesting book in many ways.

They start almost exactly the same. Like, they both start with a… a time marker. Zechariah starts in the eighth month of the second year of Darius, uh-huh. And then when I went to Haggai, it starts in the second year of King Darius in the sixth month. So they start two months apart. Yeah, that’s really interesting to me.

Yeah, they have. And chapter two starting in like, verse 10, that’s like, that’s like a month after Zechariah starts. Yeah. Because it’s. Because chapter one is like, it’s August of 520 BCE. Chapter two says one month later.

Right.

And then the end of chapter two is like two months later.

The thing that’s interesting to me about that is that I always sort of think in my mind as I’m reading these stories, I always want it to be like, there’s one group of people, there’s one kingdom, there’s one prophet, there’s one high priest, there’s one king or whatever. And… and I want that to just… and then, you know, one guy dies and another guy takes his place.

But this is all happening concurrently. And it’s different prophets and it’s different people and it’s…

And they don’t seem to be aware of each other.

Yeah, they’re very confusing.

So. So maybe maybe set the table a little bit with like, Darius and where.

We are, where we’re at, where we are. Okay.

And all that sort of thing.

So this is, this is what’s going on in the Persian period. So 587 BCE, we have the destruction of Jerusalem. We have the forced migration of the people of Judah to Babylon. In 539-ish BCE, you have Cyrus the Great besieges—lays siege to Babylon and conquers it, effectively ending the Babylonian empire and taking over. And now we have what we affectionately refer to as the Persian period. So the Persian empire has taken over Mesopotamia, okay. And shortly afterwards, we have Cyrus—and this is, you know, praised in, in the book of Second Isaiah—allows the Judahites to return to their land. Some of them go, some of them stay, some of them are coming back and forth because this is now one of the provinces and it’s under, you know, the supervision of a Persian governor of some kind, but they appoint locals and things like this.

So we’re around 520 BCE. So this is like 19 years after the conquering of Babylon by Cyrus the Great. So the Judahites have been under Persian hegemony—or hegemony, if you’re nasty—for 19 years now. Okay. So they’re kind of settling in. And the story is we’re in… we’re back in the land of Israel and how are things going? What will we have?

Because, you know, they’re taking care of their own houses and their own crops and stuff like that. And there’s, you know, there’s a bit of a famine and Haggai’s like, it’s because y’all are neglecting the temple. You’re neglecting God’s house. That’s what you need to prioritize because otherwise this is covenant rebellion. God’s not going to fully fulfill the prophecy unless you’re actually following the rules.

Right? And it does say that. It does talk about how you have sown much and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough. You drink, but you never have your fill. So, yes, the God is. And the idea here is that God is punishing everybody because. Because the temple ain’t built yet.

Yes, it is. In more or less in. In ruins because they got more important things to worry about. And Haggai’s like, this is the most important thing.

And I gestured for those of you who are listening and just have the audio. It was, you know, you should have seen it. Anyway, and then we get into chapter two of Haggai. The other chapter of Haggai.

And it’s. It starts one month later. So you got to imagine your little Bikini Bottom “one month later.” You. You get in there and they’re starting to rebuild the temple, and it’s just not as grand as we.

We should be clear for one thing about who Haggai is talking to. The governor of Judah is. Do. Would you say that name, please?

Zerubbabel.

Zerubbabel, which. That’s super fun.

Yeah, son of.

And that’s Shealtiel or Shealtiel is as.

It looks on the page.

This is where. This is where the sporting goods store got their name from.

Yeah, exactly.

They just. They cut it down a little bit, but.

So that’s the. So Zerubbabel is the. The governor of Judah, and Joshua, son of Jehozadak is. Is the. The high priest.

So this. This is interesting. Jehozadak is. You know, that name begins with a version of the Tetragrammaton. Right. So for. For folks who were like, well, they didn’t say the Tetragrammaton if they said this dude’s name. They kind of did say the. The Tetragrammaton. But yeah, and Jehozadak, that would be like Melchizedek. I mean, my king is Tzedek, which could have been the name of a deity, or it could just mean righteous or righteousness. And this is Adonai is righteous or righteousness or something.

So. And Shealtiel, that is the first common singular affix form of the verb shaal, which means to ask. So this is. I asked and then El would be the God. So I asked this of God would be what that name means. But yeah, they definitely have to be.

Confused with Shealtiel.

No, that would be. That would be different. So you’ve got. Yeah, you’ve got one that’s still around. So you still know people named Josh. Not too many Zerubbabels. No, I. I think it’s hilarious. Well, we do have. One of the. One of the best names is. Oh, gosh, now I’ve forgotten his name. Because I know it’s not the exact same, but Isaiah was supposed to name his son who? Maher-shalal-hash-baz. And so we have Mahershala Ali is. Is the one actor who’s got most of that name. But, yeah, in the 19th century, it was a lot cooler to have bizarre biblical names.

Biblical names?

Yeah, Mephibosheth and. And stuff like that. So I would have loved to have known a Zerubbabel or Jehozadak or Shealtiel or two.

But I’m just going to name name drop a little bit. Mahershala Ali. When he was giving his Oscar acceptance speech, namechecked my own acting teacher as one of his influential acting teachers.

Oh, very cool.

So I. I share a little bit of that Oscar, I think.

But you don’t share any of the infamy of that other actor you’ve talked about. Kind of a jerk.

But did he study under the same acting teacher? Okay, so, yeah, you win some, you lose some.

Yeah, exactly.

They can’t all be home runs. And so we get into chapter two. It’s one month later, and the elders who were like, I was a little boy when… when Solomon’s temple was around, they’re like, yeah, that doesn’t look like Solomon’s temple, man. That’s… that’s kind of, what are we doing here? And to which Haggai is like, hey, come on, man. Remember the promise. God’s future kingdom. This is just a shadow of things that are to come when you know, in… in that day kind of language where we’re gonna have the new Jerusalem and everything’s gonna be happy, happy, joy, joy.

Yeah, since I’m… since I’m in old cartoon mode. And then that… so that’s like chapter two, verses one through nine. And then we get the… a call to covenant faithfulness in verses 10 through 19. And this is two months later, we have this discussion about ritual purity, which I think is… I want… in fact, I want to read some of this. Let me just do so. On the 24th day of the ninth month in the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Haggai, saying, thus says the Lord of hosts, Ask the priests for a ruling. So he’s on the golf course. He’s like, I need a… I need a ruling over here.

Right?

So they call the priest over, and he says, if one carries consecrated meat in the folds of one’s garment, and with the fold touches bread or stew or wine or oil or any kind of food, does it become holy? And… and this is kind of a theological question. It’s like, I’ve got this holy piece of meat. I stuck it in my pocket. If I touch other stuff, does that stuff… now, does the whole… the… the property of holiness transfer to the other stuff?

Right, right. Can… can this make my stew holy? Because I would like to have holy stew.

Who doesn’t want… who… who doesn’t want their stew to have a little bit of holiness to it?

What is it? All I said was that dinner was good enough for Jehovah.

Stone him!

Any women in the crowd?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

The priest answered, no. Then where did I go? There it is. Then Haggai said, if one who is unclean by contact with a dead body touches any of these, does it become unclean? So now we have the… the reverse of this. So we’ve got uncleanness. Does… is that the transitive property of uncleanness? Does that transfer over? And the priest answered, yes, it becomes unclean. Haggai then said, so is it with this people and with this nation before me, says the Lord, and so with every work of their hands, what they offer there is unclean. But now consider what will come to pass from this day on. And the idea is basically that they are ritually impure, they’re doing stuff wrong, and they’re going to try to rebuild God’s temple, which is supposed to be holy. And it’s not that building the temple creates something holy that then transfers holiness to them. They’re building something holy while they’re unclean, meaning they’re transferring the uncleanness to the temple.

Basically, you’re trampling dirt all around in my temple.

I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a construction site, but you’re gonna get dirty. Yeah, it seems like uncleanness is kind of the de rigueur sort of thing there.

Yeah. And… and obviously this is not about literal physical uncleanness. But… but yeah, it is. They are sullying the temple. And so Haggai is saying, hey, we’re gonna do this right. If we’re going to do this in a way that helps to bring about God’s kingdom, the… this future, you know, new Jerusalem that’s going to happen, we need to ensure that we are all holy, so we need to be obedient. We need to put behind us all this unfaithfulness. It’s… it’s basically he’s checking them on their faithfulness to… to God’s requirements. And then the last few verses 20 through 23. This is the final segment and it’s on the… the exact same day. So we got August 520, we got one month later, we got two months later, and then we got… later that same day, the word of the Lord came a second time to Haggai: speak to Zerubbabel, governor of Judah, saying, I am about to shake the heavens and the earth and overthrow the throne of kingdoms.

I’m about to destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations and overthrow the chariots and their riders and horses, and their riders shall fall everyone by the sword of a comrade on that day, says the Lord of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel, my servant, son of Shealtiel, says the Lord, and make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you, says the Lord of hosts.

And let me just throw this out there, okay. If all of that last bit of prophecy had come true about overthrowing the throne of kingdoms and destroying the strength of kingdoms and the nations and blah, blah, blah, the chariots and the riders and blah, blah, blah, it feels like we would have heard more about Zerubbabel if that—if he had been raised up in this grand way that Haggai seems to have promised.

Yeah, but really all you hear about him is that the temple that was built is named after him. Zerubbabel’s Temple, like the, the second temple is known by a number of folks as Zerubbabel’s Temple, at least up until the period when Herod kind of renovated everything. Well, you have the Hasmonean Kingdom. It gets desecrated, it gets rededicated. They do some construction work and then Herod does some construction work. So there are constantly people doing work on it, but.

And then finally they call it the Delta Center again.

And I think, I think 519 is the traditional date of the dedication of the second temple. So, like, it happens shortly after this. But yeah, this promise seems to suggest something big should have happened toward the end of the 6th century BCE but no, Persia is going to be in charge for a while, like down until around the, the second half of the fourth century BCE. So it’s gonna be like still another 190 years or so before the Persian kingdom gets overthrown by Alexander the Great. So, so yeah, this, this is kind of a hinting at, at something messianic that doesn’t really seem to, to come to pass.

Can I propose an alternate interpretation?

Propose away.

I think that the—what the lesson we are to learn from this is if you want to get a big project done, and I think I’ve seen this many times in modern day, if you want to get a big, let’s face it, this is a real estate deal. If you want to get a big project done, what you do is you promise the governor that he’s going to be famous. He’s going to be the biggest thing ever. Everybody’s going to love you.

Big, big, beautiful temple.

Yeah. Oh, everybody look, you’re going to be, everyone’s going to think you’re the biggest thing that’s ever happened. You, you, you butter them up as much as you can, and then you get, you know, the gold and the silver for the, for the temple. Otherwise, you know what, is he going to give up his gold and silver? No, he’s not going to do it.

And we didn’t cover Haggai’s name.

No, we didn’t.

Haggai seems like a masculine plural version of hag, which is pilgrimage or festival or something like that. Might have a first common singular pronominal suffix. It might be like my celebration or festival or something like that. Exactly what it means is debated, but it could indicate that Haggai might have been born during one of the, one of the big festivals that was celebrated in.

So that’s something like that. And, and that root word is probably the same root word as the, as the Arabic hajj, which is the, the pilgrimage journey. The pilgrimage to Mecca.

There is probably some etymological link there, but my Arabic is muy malo, so.

Okay, fair enough.

But yeah, it is. Yeah, I forgot what I was gonna say. I had something and, well, I derailed you.

Yeah, that is my job.

It was a little nudge. It was a little nudge, but. Yeah, but that is. Yeah, Haggai is. And like I said, one of the reasons. I don’t remember if I said this, but like I was thinking one of the reasons I wanted to go over this is because this is one of those texts that a lot of people just don’t know about.

You could stop most people who say they read the Bible a lot and be like, tell me about Haggai. And they’ll be like, who?

No, that’s. He was a prophet.

Right.

I’m pretty sure.

But, but now, you know, it was about the, the cleanliness of the people, their, their priorities related to the temple, looking forward to the New Jerusalem and God’s kingdom, making sure they were pure enough, ritually clean enough to be able to participate in the building of this temple.

But, but they did get a temple out of it. That’s the most important. You say what you got to say.

To get that temple which lasted until 70 CE in some form or another. You know, it’s, it’s the, the temple of Theseus to some degree. Cuz, you know, it was being, it was being renovated, it was being built over again. It had different things.

Not unlike the temple here in downtown Salt Lake City, which is currently under deep renovation also.

Yeah, didn’t they say they were going to be done in 2025?

They did say that.

I think they originally said that. I think now April 2026 is when they’re like, that’s when we’re gonna have our opening, soft opening celebration where they’re gonna.

There you go.

So, and, and behold, Zerubbabel said to the people. Yeah, okay, well thank you for that. This has been an interesting journey into Zerubbabel the name. All right friends, if you would like to become a part of making this show, go and be and be one of our grand patrons. And they’re all grand and we love them deeply. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and donate the amount that you would like as a monthly dogma donation. Donors can get an early and ad-free version of every episode as well as the after party which is you and me, Dan, doing some, some extra bonus content every week. So head on over there if you, if you have the cash to do it. If you don’t have the coin for that, then please leave us a five star review on whatever thing you’re on that you’re listening to and share us to all your family and friends.

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Bye everybody.

Did the Bible Steal Its Stories?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology