Is Allie Beth Stuckey a Sheep or a Goat?

We’re back to this new right-wing authoritarian talking point. Wait a minute. The problem is empathy because Jesus was big on being like, oh, don’t go too far. Love your neighbor, but don’t go nuts.

Don’t be crazy about it.

That’s just irrational. 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?

Things are great. Things are great. I’m very grateful that Aaron was able to show up last week and help us out.

Appreciate Aaron stepping in, in coming in clutch there. While I was out of town in Boston and, and New York, I’m walking here as, as everyone traditionally says when they’re crossing the street in New York.

City, I assume that you hit a car, that car almost hit you and then you slammed the hood, as is the tradition.

Yes. As you know, when in Rome, as they say.

Yeah, I’ll ask you more about that. This is a little teaser. I’ll ask you more about your trip and we’ll hear some, some fun tales in the patrons only content in the after party of this very episode. So maybe now would be a good time for people to sign up over on Patreon.

Yeah, get on, get in on that sweet, sweet, sweet. What? It’s been, it’s been two weeks since I’ve done a podcast.

Yeah, yeah, you’re not.

Get in on that sweet, sweet after party action.

Yeah, man. Oof.

We’ll get it. We’ll get back into the swing of it someday.

Yeah, it’s a work in progress.

It won’t be today. I’m looking forward to the show today. We’ve got a couple things that we’re talking about at first, first we’re going to be taking issue. Look, the—I don’t know if you, Dan, have been checking in with the news at all lately, but people been trying to avoid it. People have been talking a little bit about immigration. You and I have talked about it on the show several times, but we got, we got a different angle, a different thing to talk about. We’re gonna launch from, from something that we saw from one Ms. Allie Beth Stuckey. So that’ll be fun to, to chat about that. And then in the second half of the show we got an artifacts and fiction and it’s one that I haven’t heard about, but it, it looks really interesting. Yeah, Just some fun, some fun pieces of paper that were found in the middle of the river.

Yes. On an island in the middle of a river. Islands in the stream.

Yeah. And what we are.

This one has a name that everybody pronounces differently.

Did you see me deftly avoiding, trying to, trying to say the name of the island in the river? Because that’s what I was trying to do. We will, we will have to get to the name of that island when we get there. But the, the papyri that come therefrom are the real crux of what we’re getting to. And I’m excited to talk about it. But first, taking issue. So what do we take an issue with? We’re taking issue with Allie Beth Stuckey, as I said. Who, who, who made a video that irked and rankled you?

Irked and rankled a handful of folks. Myself among them. Yes. Because there have, though there’s been debate about immigration, about a lot of the cracking down on immigration, some of the draconian measures that are being taken in order to slake this identity marker of brutalizing the foreigner, because that’s what helps people maintain their grip on power. But we’ve had some folks who are large content creators on social media, on TikTok, on Instagram, elsewhere, who, who have not traditionally waded into biblical debates, who, in response to a lot of the folks who are rah-rah-ing the separating of families and the snatching people off the streets by unnamed masked somebodies and shipping them off to gulags in other nations without due process.

And people have begun to share passages from the Bible, including passages from Matthew 25 . There’s a parable there in Matthew 25 that is generally known as the, the parable of the sheep and the goats.

Now, this is not our first, our first foray into, into this encounter with, with Matthew 25 . The parable of the talents immediately precedes this particular thing. And, and I want to just quickly, I, I was reading about this, and I’m going to take a little bit of issue with you categorizing this as a parable, because it actually doesn’t fit that mold perfectly.

Do you know if you understand the distinction that I’m making? Because he’s, it’s literally just saying what’s going to happen.

Yeah. And there’s a, I, I think, you know, when, when you look at allegory versus simile versus parable versus metaphor. Like they bleed into each other a little bit, but absolutely. We can, we can. I, I can let that go. I’m not married to the identification.

Look, I was just trying to keep in the theme of taking issue. So I took issue with that. We’re fine. Let’s move on. Because, because, yeah, what it has to say, at least on the surface, it, when I read it, it feels pretty straightforward.

Well, you’ve got, you’ve got, it’s talking about the judgment of the nations. And yes, in verse 31, we begin: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” Thus the title of the thing, the parable.

The parable or non-parable of the sheep and the goats.

And the sheep are on the right hand and the goats are on the left, as the great poet once said: sheep go to—

Great poet being Matthew 25 in this case.

Well, I was going to say—isn’t it Cake who sings “Sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell”?

Oh, I don’t know. It is weird. Like, like the, the separation. Yeah, clearly in that time, like, sheep and goats…

Were a big deal and sheep were good and apparently goats were bad.

Why do you keep goats then, anyway?

And, and then we have the, the king who says something that is evidently a little more cryptic than a lot of people think. The king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” And this word for stranger is xenos in Greek, which is where we get xenophobia. It means a foreigner, an alien, a stranger, somebody who comes from somewhere else that we don’t know. “I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.” And the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly, I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.”

And then he says the opposite to the goats who are on the left. You didn’t do this, and therefore you are going to the bad place.

You are, you’re, you’re very naughty goats.

Yes. And what Allie Beth Stuckey argues in response to a content creator who is reading this passage and says, “Wow, that sounds like Jesus is pretty liberal to me,” and Allie Beth Stuckey says, “Tisk, tisk. The phrase ’the least of these brothers and sisters of mine,’ or ’the least of these my brethren,’ as I think how the King James Version—yes, ’the least of these my brethren’ is how the King James Version words it.” It’s masculine plural in Greek, but in mixed company, you would always default to the masculine. So this could be a mixed group. And Allie Beth Stuckey says, “No, no, this refers to persecuted Christians, not to all the poor of the world. Not to all the persecuted of the world, only Christians who are persecuted for the name of Jesus.”

And lest you, lest you listener at home think that Dan is somehow exaggerating, no, she very specifically says, no, not the poor of the world. Like, she is explicit about this. So Dan, he who speaks the ancient Greek and can read it and all that sort of thing: who’s right here? Is she—what is she basing that on?

Well, this is—this is interpretive. Like we can’t look in the Greek—it doesn’t hold up a sign and say, “this is the correct interpretation.” You’ve got to read it in context. And we have other passages where Jesus seems to talk about brothers and sisters as those who are followers of him.

And so the interpretation that is traditional, that goes back to early Christianity and was the most prominent interpretation all the way up until probably the last century or two, has been that this does refer to Christians. And the other interpretation that has become more popular in the last century or two is that this refers to anybody and everybody out there in the world. So the—the more recent interpretation is the slightly more egalitarian, slightly less ethnocentric interpretation that a lot of people argue resonates more with things like the parable of the Good Samaritan, resonates more with the “love your neighbor,” resonates more with a lot of Jesus’s other messaging related to how we’re supposed to treat other people. But I—I think based on the use of references to my brothers and—

My brothers and sisters and things like that from elsewhere in the Gospels and including the Gospel of Matthew , I think there’s a—probably a good case to make that this is a reference to the followers of Jesus, because this is about the final judgment. This is about the people who are going to inherit the kingdom of God. And so I—I think that this non-parable or what have you may be saying, “Hey, if you’re a follower of Jesus, you’ve got to be treating everybody the way you would treat Jesus.”

Yeah. This brother. And can I just hang on—on the brother/sister thing just for a minute? Because isn’t there—what’s the passage where—where someone asks Jesus, “Who is my brother?”

Or like, “Who is my neighbor?”

Oh, okay, so that’s a different word. Okay.

Yes, that’s the—the lawyer wanting to prove himself as—

Right.

Yeah. “Well, who is my neighbor?” Because he wants to restrict the scope of his responsibility to care for others. And I think that that’s probably what’s going on with this rather callous response to the interpretation of Matthew 25 as—as a manifestation of a rather liberal outlook. Yeah. So even though I think that there’s a good case to make that this passage is probably referring to Christians, I don’t think that lets Allie Beth Stuckey off the hook for two reasons.

And the first reason has to do with the fact that she’s drawing an even smaller circle. She’s not just saying Christians, she’s saying persecuted Christians. And she seems to be making it about Christians who are persecuted because they’re Christians.

Right.

And that would be a very small circle indeed.

Well, what’s—what’s ironic is she probably includes herself in that. But—but no. Yeah.

You know, all the people in the White House, half the people in Congress, these are the persecuted, the lowly of the world.

I got bad news for her because if you live in the United States of America, you are not a persecuted Christian.

Yeah. And—and so—and, and particularly not for being a Christian.

Right.

So that is a—a very small circle indeed. But I think there’s a reason that she’s trying to draw the circle that small. And the reason is that when we consider what this is about, this is about the Trump administration violating the constitutional and the human rights of not just undocumented immigrants, but asylum seekers, legal immigrants, and even US citizens, denying them due process, violating their rights, brutalizing them, stoking chaos and fear, terrorizing people to try to terrorize them into submission to this fascist agenda. The people on the receiving end of this are overwhelmingly Christians. There have been lots of studies going on on the religious identities of migrant groups around the world, because you have trends where—where people are leaving one country and entering other countries and that kind of stuff.

And a lot of this research, when it’s looking at who’s coming into the United States and who’s being targeted, who is at risk of deportation under Trump’s policies, the estimates place them at about 75 to 85% Christians.

In fact, one group which is like—and I would have to—to look up the—the combination of groups that produce this report, like, it’s not liberals, it’s like a council of Catholic bishops.

Right.

And a. An evangelical group and all this. They came up with a report, and they said that 1 in 12 Christians in the United States, you just look at everybody in the United States, you whittle it down to the Christians. One in 12 Christians is at risk of deportation because of Trump’s policies.

Like, almost 10% of the Christians in the United States are at risk of deportation because of what Trump is doing. So if these are not the stranger, if these are not the xenoi, if these are not the ones in prison.

Right.

That this non-parable is telling you if you want to be on the right hand, you better go visit them, you better welcome them, you better give them clothing, you better give them food, you better give them something to drink. If you’re taking that seriously, then these are those folks.

Right.

That is who is being targeted right now.

Even if you’re. Even if it. If you’re going with the interpretation that this only means Christians.

Right.

You’re still. You’re still in trouble. You still, like, that’s not where you want to be.

Yeah. And. And I think. I don’t know if. If Stuckey realizes this and then is intentionally trying to say, oh, well, I’m gonna. I’m gonna interpret it as Christians who are persecuted Christians because they’re Christians, because that would then allow her to paint the line outside. They paint all those folks outside of that circle. We’re not persecuting you because of your Christianity. Persecuting you because of the color of your skin and the nation that you came from. But.

Right.

Or your.

Or your persecution in your old. In your other country, you know, in. Back in Venezuela or whatever. Doesn’t count, because it wasn’t persecution because you’re a Christian. It was persecution because of X, Y and Z factors in that country.

Right.

And therefore, we don’t have to shelter you and we don’t have to treat you like, like, you know, we don’t have to, to be kind to you.

Yeah. This, this is a you are not my neighbor kind of reading of this passage, but when we look at verses 35 and 36, I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was a stranger, I was naked, I was sick, I was in prison. Like, this is not people who are persecuted because they are Christians. These are just people who are fallen on hard times.

For whatever reason, because it is about a variety of different socioeconomic problems. Sickness, thirst, hunger, being a foreigner, being in prison. These are not signs of somebody who’s been persecuted specifically because they’re Christian. So I don’t buy that reading. I think that is a particularly callous reading that is doing precisely what Jesus repeatedly said in the New Testament, stop doing that. Which is precisely trying to justify yourself by saying, yeah, well, who’s my neighbor?

Yeah, exactly.

It does seem like, you know, we talk about the context, it seems like the fat, like the greater context of Jesus’s message. Like, even if he’s using different words, neighbor versus brother, whatever. It does seem like every time he talks about a foreigner, every time he talks about a stranger in need, he’s very clear. You’ve, you open the door, you help this person.

Like, is. But I think that you are being disingenuous to accuse Allie Beth Stuckey of being, of being somehow mean. You’re talking, you’re saying that the, the author of the book Toxic Empathy is somehow not being kind to other people in the world. How dare you, sir?

Yes, we’re, we’re back to this, this new right wing authoritarian talking point. Wait a minute. The problem is empathy because Jesus was big on being like, oh, don’t go too far.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, reel it back, you guys. You were, you were, you went way over the, overboard with kindness and, and caring of other people. Just dial that back a lot.

Love your neighbor, but don’t go nuts.

Don’t be crazy about it. You’ll be nuts.

That’s just irrational. And here is the other part of this argument that I think is bafflingly stupid, because what you’re, what the argument is is, is, hey, it’s great to do these things, but not at the expense of law and order or peace.

Get rid of all enforcement of immigration laws. Let everybody in. Don’t you dare kick anyone out, irrespective of what crimes they commit.

Right.

I don’t see anybody saying that. What I see people saying is we can enforce these laws, which, by the way, are not very. There’s not a ton at stake. Like.

Right.

If you overstay a visa, that’s not even a criminal offense. That’s a civil offense. That’s like a parking ticket. If you cross the border without documentation and you’re not seeking asylum. Like, if you’re seeking asylum, you can get into the country any way you want, whether you.

Yeah. Or rather, you’re supposed to be able to.

You should be able to.

Just according to U.S. law.

Right.

You are allowed to, which is a point I will come back around to. But you can show up anywhere at a border crossing. Crossing the border somewhere else if you are seeking asylum, it is legal to do that. But even if you do cross the border without documentation and climb over Trump’s fence, like 6-year-olds can do, that’s a criminal offense. But it’s a misdemeanor.

Right.

Like the notion that we should be snatching people off the streets, hurling them into vans and sending them to the Gulag for a misdemeanor,

Right.

Is pretty Machiavellian.

It’s like the least violent crime available. It is just literally like walking. It is the crime of climbing.

Well, you’re here and you’re not supposed to be here.

Where not only is it, not only is it not a violent crime, but like, you know, they love to talk about criminals. These are criminals.

Other than the crime of actually crossing the border without documentation. We know—like, we have data on this—we know that actually the immigrant population is far less criminally minded and commits far less crime

Than native-born people.

We want these people in our country.

We’re safer around undocumented immigrants.

We are doing better with them here.

Yeah. And so people are not saying, let’s get rid of the laws. We’re not advocating for lawlessness. No. We can enforce all of these laws without breaking up families, without brutalizing people, without trying to terrorize them so that they will stop trying to get into the country. That’s the concern. When people are quoting scripture, people are quoting Leviticus 19:33 and 34, or quoting the whatever of the Sheep and the Goats, it’s not because they’re advocating for lawlessness. It’s because they’re recognizing we can enforce this without being jerks about it. We can enforce it without hurting people. We can enforce these things appropriately without cracking down on immigration, without demonizing and dehumanizing and violating the constitutional rights of these folks.

Yeah, and to be clear, they have constitutional rights too. Like, you don’t have to be born here to have. Like our Constitution protects every person within our borders. Every single one of them.

Due process is guaranteed to every person who is within the United States.

Right. Can I just quickly, since you mentioned it, let’s jump to Leviticus 19 .

Oh, yeah, Leviticus 19 .

Because you skimmed over it. So let’s, let’s hit it.

And importantly, because here’s where some people get into the Hebrew and they’re like, oh, I know the Hebrew and are just flat out lying. So 33 and 34. And the NRSV uses the word alien. This is kind of a term of art in the Hebrew Bible. And so it gets translated weird ways. A resident foreigner is how the NET translates it. But 33 and 34 say, when an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native born among you. You shall love the alien as yourself, for you are aliens in the land of Egypt. I am Adonai, your God.

Yeah, that’s. That’s pretty, like, unambiguous if you ask me. It does not. It. It does not leave a lot of room for interpretation. Yeah, except I’m sure that you have that they find room for interpretation. So what do they say?

So you’ve got a noun and a verb here. The noun is ger, and it is related to the verb gur. And what they say is that.

I feel like you’re making it up now. Just ger and gur. Come on, like, do better. You just come up with more interesting ones.

The argument. And there was a video I responded to where somebody quoted the NIV where it says the foreigner resides with you in your land. And, and this content creator was like, well, the word you changed there was ger, and that means sojourner. And you changed it to resides. And like, one, you’re arguing it’s a noun, it’s a verb. And two, they were quoting directly from the NIV. They didn’t change anything. But what they insisted this meant was somebody who was residing in the land with permission and legally. And like they, they retroject this notion of immigration laws into the Bible, as if everybody who traveled on camelback or whatever into another nation had like a border crossing where somebody was like, papers, papers, let’s see your papers. Like that didn’t exist in that time period.

Well, I mean, the whole concept of immigration law is really new. Like very, very recent.

Surprisingly recent. Yeah.

In the whole world.

Like it just was invented recently. Like in the last 120, I don’t know, a couple hundred years.

Few hundred years in the United States, the closest we come to an immigration law is probably. And there was a. Oh, shoot, I forget what it was called. There was an act in 1790, I forget what it was called. But basically it said that the only people that could become citizens were freeborn white people.

Right.

So like that’s, that’s the earliest thing we could refer to as an immigration law. But that was just about citizenship. That wasn’t even about just coming into the country for almost 100 years after that, anybody could just come into the country. But it is, I think it is important to point out that our immigration laws are founded on white supremacy.

Right.

And then we get to 1882 where we get the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is self explanatory.

Yeah, it was well named. It was, it was, it’s a bad. Accurate, but it was, it was named correctly.

Somebody, I hope they got their flowers for coming up with a name that really honed in on the substance of the act. But that was, that was the first time that they started saying, hey, we want to keep certain people out.

Right.

The, the, the laws were precisely about saying, these are undesirable people.

Not, not just anyone who’s outside of our country, but specifically you. And then in the 1920s, we get a bunch of acts that are saying, okay, we’re going to have quotas on how many people we’re going to take from every country. And if you were from northern or Western Europe, you got a higher quota. If you were from southern or Eastern Europe or, heaven help you, Asia or Africa, your quotas were significantly less. So still it was white supremacy. But this is only a hundred years ago when we started establishing the immigration laws as we know them today. But I want to circle back to the thing I said I would circle back to.

When it comes to lawlessness, when it comes to obeying the law, the primary violators of the law right now are the Trump administration.

Violating the constitutional rights, violating due process. Violate. And trying to change, like talking about changing the law, talking about trying to find ways to deport US citizens, talking about how they, oh, we don’t need to obey all of this stuff.

Like there’s not another word for it. It is dumb.

About this argument and the fact that the argument is being made by people like Stuckey and people who are trying to say that, trying to come at it from a quote-unquote from a Christian perspective when, when there are, you know, verses like the Leviticus verses, where it’s just, where it’s just so clear. “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress them.” That’s just so clear. That’s just so easy. And it’s not. And it’s literally like, like you say, it’s what our laws require. Non-oppressive treatment is like kind of a whole thing. But not anymore. I don’t know. It’s that maybe that’s gone now.

Yeah. So I get particularly annoyed when people try to leverage their faith and their reading of the Bible to endorse and justify and excuse hurting people, like going out of their way to hurt people, going significantly increasing the deficit and the debt in order to hurt people.

Right. Remind me what scripture it was where Jesus said that the cruelty is the point. I’m pretty sure that he said—he must have said that at some point because that seems to be the guiding, the guiding principle of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

Well, and if we’re talking about the Gospel of Matthew , there’s a Hebrew Bible scripture that is quoted no less than two times just in the Gospel of Matthew itself, and that’s Hosea 6:6 , where Jesus repeatedly says, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice.” And in one of those passages, he tells the people, go and learn what that means. And in another passage, he excoriates people for focusing on the minutiae of the law in ways that advance their social standing, and then says they ignore the weightier matters of the law, which have to do with justice, with righteousness, with equity, with people having equal access in society. And a lot of people don’t think equity was a concept back then. It 100% was because just like the framers of our Constitution, the folks who were writing the Gospels and—and parts of the Hebrew Bible knew that the last thing you wanted was an unstable society.

Right.

Because that led to rebellion, that led to uprising, that led to instability. And so they always emphasize the need for equity. Doesn’t mean that there is no rich and there is no poor, but it means that you are providing for everybody. The widow, the orphan, the—the poor, the oppressed, the foreigner. They all have mechanisms within society that allow them to get what they need.

Well, I think that that is a good summary of why the Trump administration is bad. And Allie Beth Stuckey can, can go Stuckey herself—that, that could be misinterpreted. Let’s, let’s, let’s pretend I didn’t say it and move on to our next, our next thing, which is artifacts and fiction and this, this particular artifacts and fiction we’re talking about. You say the name, you say the name of this island. I’m not going to say it first.

Okay, so I say Elephantini. Okay, I have heard Elephantini. I have heard Elephantine.

I have not heard Elephantine in reference to the island. I have heard that as a, as an adjective.

Right. And that is not what. Weird. It’s the same word. It is spelled exactly the same as the adjective. But this is an island in the Nile in, in southern Egypt.

And I will, I will tell you the Greek transliteration. I think it—I don’t know if the Greek is a transliteration of Coptic or what, but the Greek is Elephantini. So that’s why I go with Elephantini, because I think that’s the closest. So. But that’s just me. Don’t take my word for it.

Well, we’ll just, we will make that the official pronunciation of the island for this episode of the show. And then people can feel free to comment their, their various and sundry other pronunciations.

Fair enough.

So what, okay, we’re talking about an island in the middle of the Nile. Why, why are we talking about this island? What is special about it?

Because it looks like an elephant? No, because it is. This is the location of an ancient Jewish temple. So this is a. A place where there was a Jewish garrison, There was a Jewish group of some kind that lived there in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE so between around 500 BCE down to in the 300s BCE, there were Jewish folks who lived on this island, and there was a temple there.

And that’s a big deal, right?

Because that’s a big deal.

They weren’t supposed to have temples outside of Jerusalem.

Well, according to the Deuteronomistic literature, which probably hadn’t been written yet, because these groups were probably Jewish folks who, during the seventh century leading up to the Babylonian exile, probably were like, yo, this party’s dead. Anyway, we’re gonna bounce. And they dipped on out of there and probably made their way into Egypt and down the Nile or up the Nile, depending on how you look at it.

Up or down?

Yeah, to Elephantine, which is by Aswan. It is in the. Right by the upper Nile. Yeah. And. And set up shop there. And at some point, they. They seem to have created a temple down there, and they were making all kinds of offerings. And we have. We’ve discovered hundreds of papyri of texts from. In and around this place. A lot of them in Aramaic, a lot of them related to the Jewish community that was located there. And there’s one. There’s one reference to something that seems like it could be about a Passover celebration. However, it does not seem to line up with how Passover is represented in the book of Exodus .

Which suggests that when these people came down here, when they left the land of. Of Judah and came down here, they probably didn’t have the Torah. They probably didn’t have any part of the Torah. They probably had knowledge of some kind of festival that would later become written into this narrative as the Passover and would have all these rules and regulations about it that, by the way, are themselves inconsistent from one book to another in the Torah. But they don’t show any awareness of the Torah and the specific laws and legislation and including the Deuteronomistic literature, which.

And you said that this was what time period? This was 4th and 5th century BC.

So 5th and 4th century BCE is when we have a lot of these. These texts.

Okay, so. And presumably I. My understanding was that the tradition is that the Torah came from long before then.

Yeah, yeah. Probably not. Probably not.

Probably not.

Was. Was the discovery of these papyri, like, one of the major reasons why we think probably not. Or is it just supporting evidence?

It’s supporting evidence, but scholars have, have been hypothesizing for a while that the, the Pentateuch, the Torah, the first five books of Moses probably came together piecemeal over the course of several centuries and probably did not come together as a single collection of texts until 5th or 4th century BCE is kind of a traditional dating, but these days, yeah, so like we have the priestly literature which is probably post-exilic. It’s probably coming from the late 6th or the early 5th century BCE. Deuteronomy was the earliest layers probably were, were brought together at the end of the 7th century BCE. You have other traditions that are probably from earlier and other traditions that are from later. But in light of what we have from Elephantine and in light of other evidence that suggests we don’t have widespread awareness of the legislation of the Torah, much less enforcement of that legislation until the middle of the second century BCE.

So there are some scholars, Yonatan Adler is one of them, for instance, who, who just published a book called the Origins of Judaism. He argues it seems likely that the Maccabean revolts, the Hasmonean dynasty that was established with the Maccabean revolt, with taking back over the temple, with rededicating the temple in the 160s BCE the creation of that kingdom was probably the period at which they were like, hey, let’s use these texts, let’s make everybody aware of them. Let’s use this as an identity marker, as a way to circle the wagons around our ethnos, around our people and create this, this people group.

And because the people who occupied Elephantine probably left the land of Israel and Judah prior to the exile, they just were not aware of it.

Right.

And, and there are, there are a couple of other interesting things about this. So, so first of all, we have this temple which gets destroyed probably around 410 BCE. You have locals, Egyptians who are upset and have the, the temple in Elephantine destroyed. And we, we have some letters that people wrote that were sent to Jerusalem, to Judah, to the, there was a, a Persian governor of this region. And these letters are written to them saying, hey, we’re petitioning you to allow us to rebuild our temple because we know that Judah is in charge of our customs, our traditions. We want permission. So a guy named, a guy named Yedaniah or Yedaniah or Jedaniah, if you like, who in one of the letters does not identify himself as a member of the priestly class, but in a revised version of the same letter, we actually have multiple different, like copies of some of these letters where they’re like, you know, scratching stuff out and writing new stuff in and all that kind of stuff.

In another one, he identifies himself as a priest. And then you have the, the Judeans or the Judahites or the Jews of Elephantine writing to Bagavahya or, or Bagoyas, I think is, or Bagoas or something there. There are a few different versions of this name that we find in, like Josephus and, and the Elephantine stuff. But this is somebody who was probably around 407 BCE, was the Persian installed head of Judea. They write this letter to our Lord Bagavahya, governor of Judah, your servants Jedaniah and his colleagues, the priests who are in Elephantine the fortress, and tells the story in the month of Tammuz, year 14, of Darius the king, when Arsames had departed and gone to the king. The priests of Khnum, the god who are in Elephantine the fortress, in agreement with Vidranga, who was chief here, said the temple of Adonai the god which is in Elephantine the fortress, let them remove from there.

And so they go and demolish the temple. And then so this letter is saying, now your servants Jedaniah or Yedaniah and his colleagues and the Jews, all of them citizens of Elephantine, thus say if to our Lord it is good take thought of that temple to rebuild it, since they do not let us rebuild it. Regard your obligees and your friends who are here in Egypt. May a letter from you be sent to them about the temple of Adonai the god to rebuild it in Elephantine the fortress, just as it had been built formally. And we get this and we have a couple different copies of this letter. And then we have a, another letter that is an offer of payment for reconstructing the temple where Jedaniah or Yedaniah son of Gemariah by name. And then you’ve got a bunch of other names. Maaziah son of Nathan, Shemaiah son of Haggai, Hoshea son of Jotham, Hoshea son of Nathan.

You get all these people who, who are basically saying, let us pay to reconstruct the temple. And it seems like they were allowed to rebuild the temple. This is the conclusion of, I think, the majority of the scholars because we have another letter that was written in a later time period where somebody’s talking about, oh, I had this house and I gave it to my. It, it’s basically this legal document where somebody’s complaining about a contract or something like that, and they’re describing where the house is, and then they describe it in one part as west of it is the temple of Adonai, and the street of the king is between them. So a later letter seems to identify the temple of Adonai as presumably a functional building.

And when you say Adonai, just, just to clarify, in this case, we are talking about the tetragrammaton.

Well, the kind of the, the consonants are Y H W. So three of the four letters of the tetragrammaton, the trigrammaton. Yes. And here’s, there’s an even more interesting letter, in my opinion. Okay, that is not a letter. It’s an oath text. So we have someone who, there was a, there was an ass. It was a good ass. It was a donkey. And somebody had ownership of it. And someone else was like, hey, I’ll, I’ll give you money for half ownership in exchange for, for this other donkey or something like that.

We’re doing, we’re time sharing on donkeys now. Is that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was two weeks on and sure. And then, you know, but. And it was really hard to get out of this contract. But the. The person who was offered this deal, they evidently never closed the deal. And that guy died. And then his son showed up and was like, hey, I want my half of the ass. And so this person had to go into court and they had to swear an oath saying that they. That this deal was never closed.

And it says the oath which Menachem son of Shallum, son of Hoshayah, swore or will swear to Meshullam son of Nathan by. And then we have some divine names. Herem, the God by the place of prostration, and by Anatyaho, which seems to be the combination of the feminine divine name Anat and the trigrammaton. So.

Which would. Which is not unknown because we sometimes see Anat paired with Bethel, which is another name of a deity. We see. We see Anat Bethel, which some people think is. Is just the name of the female version. Some people think is the divine pairing. Whatever the case, we’ve got one of these Jewish folks was a very Jewish name, Menachem, who is swearing by not only a foreign deity named as according to the reconstruction of this text, but is also swearing by Anatyaho, which would seem to be a divine pairing, a divine couple, God and God’s wife, who is not Asherah here, but Anat, perhaps by analogy with this Anat Bethel divine pair.

Okay, so.

So this group is a not orthodox group according to what we have in the Hebrew Bible. But if they bounced prior to Josiah’s reforms, then it would have maybe been perfectly natural for them to be worshiping Adonai alongside Adonai’s consort, partner or wife. And so maybe Anatyaho or Anat Adonai was somebody they took with them or was a development of the divine pair that originally was Asherah and Adonai. Or maybe Asherah was with El and these people left before even the conflation of Adonai and El.

We don’t know for sure, but it’s such a tantalizing little datum that we have these, these texts that attest to these practices and these dogmas that don’t fit what the later developed Pentateuch would require followers of the Bible do. And there’s so much research that is being conducted. Elephantine is. Elephantine, excuse me, is such a fascinating location. And there are books by. I’ve got, I’ve got friends who have published books on Elephantine. In fact, there’s. I’m trying to remember the name of the book. I can’t remember. But we have a friend of mine named Colin Cornell who works a lot with deities in ancient Southwest Asia, wrote a, a paper called Elephantine Trespasses: Theological Arguments in Recent Religion History. That is, that is about what these texts might tell us about the, the religiosity of the Jewish folks who were located at Elephantine.

But I think it’s cool stuff.

You know, it would be tempting to say that these people isolated themselves and therefore, you know, you can’t sort of conclude anything because they, they, they are isolates. They are different and whatever. But the fact that they’re writing back to Judah in order, like, it seems like there was definitely transmission between these, the, the, the, the old culture and, and their, and themselves.

Yeah, yeah. This, this wasn’t a, a Blue Lagoon thing where they were like, there are more of us out there. They, they definitely know headquarters is in Judah and, and there’s, there’s obviously communication between them. And so, you know, were the folks in Judah like, oh, it’s those weirdos out in Egypt who, who don’t follow the law. You know, maybe they, they thought of them that way. Maybe they were like, oh, those, they’re, they’re our cousins. They’re a little different, but you know, they’re fine. Who’s to say exactly how the, that relationship was, was conceptualized? But yeah, I, I think just dismissing them offhand as, as this aberration that became an aberration, because I don’t think that’s accurate at all. I think the most likely way to understand the difference is to understand that they were bringing with them the traditions that existed at the time period they separated off.

Right.

And those traditions certainly continued to evolve and be renegotiated over the course of time. But, but they don’t go from being, you know, monotheistic or at least mono-Yahwistic to worshiping Anat Adonai in an unauthorized temple just because of that isolation. That, that doesn’t make as much sense to me or, or to most scholars.

Well, especially if they’re asking permission to rebuild the temple, like. Yeah, they’re very clearly sort of subjecting themselves to this, to this higher group or whatever, or to the main, to the main dudes, whoever, whoever they may have been.

Yeah. Or, or they could have just been like, well, they’re not going to let us do it. Maybe we can, you know, call your cousin. Yeah, he’s got money, but they don’t like us. You know, maybe they.

Who’s.

Who’s to say? We don’t know for sure, which is what makes this such. Such a tantalizing little.

Yeah. And so like, it broadens the scope of how we see all of this stuff. Because I think that the temptation has always been like, the more we can lock this history down to what is in just the Bible as we have it, then the easier and cleaner it is and we don’t have to think about anything else. But it’s so much broader and so much bigger than that.

Yeah. And so much more interesting. That’s what frustrates me about attempts not only to limit it to only what’s in the Bible, but then to gloss over the pluriformity that’s in the Bible. The Bible.

Right.

Like there are a lot of differences in the Bible, but if you gloss over it all and say, no, it’s all one thing, everybody was exactly the same and anytime there were divergences, that was apostasy. And you know, they, they got burned at the stake for it. Like, that’s, that’s such a boring and ahistorical way to approach the Bible. It’s so much more fascinating to let these people be who they were. And let them worship what they were worshiping instead of trying to subjugate them to the unifying frameworks that we impose on the Bible. Yeah. That’s just boring.

I agree. Although I do understand, like, the psychological difficulty of. It is so much easier if you. Especially if you want to believe it as a. As a guiding document. As a, you know, it’s so much easier if you can, if you can trust it to be univocal, inerrant, whatever. Like that. That feels safer. But don’t sacrifice the truth for that sort of wrong feeling of safety.

Yeah. And that’s a question I think a lot more people need to ask themselves. Do I want to know the truth or do I just want to feel safe in my identity politics?

And maybe if you do want to feel safe, that’s okay as long as you acknowledge that that’s what you’re doing and just say, look, there may be more, and I’m just not willing to explore past that. But when you draw hard lines and when you say, this is what it says, and, you know, in the case of, like, Allie Beth Stuckey or whatever, you start to say, this is what it says. And therefore, I can. We should be oppressive to this group, or we. Or it’s totally justifiable to hurt other people or whatever. That’s where you got to draw a line. That’s where you got to say, either. Either you’re going to acknowledge the grander scope of reality or, you know, or shut up. Those are the better options.

Yeah. Keep it to yourself. Yeah. And, yeah, I think that would be a much more productive approach. I think it would be an approach that would make Christianity, at least some streams of tradition within Christianity a lot more popular.

Like, I don’t, I get, I get messages every day from people who are like, if you were around when I was going through these things, I would still be Christian. Yeah. It’s like, I, I think I probably do more. I, I don’t know the numbers. I don’t have the data.

Right.

But I would not be surprised if I am more beneficial to missionary work for Christians than apologists are.

Yeah. Who knows? Maybe it’s 50. 50. You, you invite people, you give people the freedom to leave if they want to, and you give people freedom. The freedom to stay with a broader sort of.

Spectrum of knowledge and understanding, and who cares where they land as long, you know, be good people. That’s the main thing. Yeah. So I. What a. That that’s what we’re going to end with. We’re going to end with be good people. I think that’s a good, that’s a good message for the show, don’t you?

I like it.

All right, well friends, if you would like to be good people to us, you can become a patron of the show over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma which is where you can sign up to get early and ad free access to, to every episode and you can actually get the, you can get the after party which then you’ll hear Dan’s stories of his many adventures in, in the big bad cities of Boston and New York.

Bye everybody.

Is Allie Beth Stuckey a Sheep or a Goat?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology